Author: Daniel Taylor

ISBN: 0143037641

We hear so much about caring for aging parents these days that at times it feels that children are in a no win situation. Care-giving involves making difficult decisions which should be handled with as much thought and discussion as possible.

Thanks to Daniel Taylor, a 20 year veteran of the financial services industry, an attorney, and president of his own North Carolina-based advisory firm, for showing us an intelligent way in dealing with the emotional, practical, and financial challenges of caring for aging parents.

Taylor has put together an excellent guide book, The Parent Care Conversation: Six Strategies for Transforming the Emotional and Financial Future of Your Aging Parents where he presents a system that he developed that grew out of his own experiences in dealing with his father’s care. It is a system he has structured around the acronym CARE which stands for the following: challenges, alternatives, resources, and experience.

This system will aid children in opening up the doors of communication with their parents on key issues relating to their future care-even those which they were reluctant to discuss. According to Taylor, the CARE “hear and now” listening system focuses on the knack of asking the right questions now in order to avoid confusion and conflict in the future from chaotic decision making.

Taylor applies his system to six conversations that children should have with their aging parents: 

1) The big picture conversation pertaining to your parent’s vision of their future.

2) The money conversation where you wish to obtain an overall grasp of your parents’ current and future financial needs.

3) The property conversation which focuses on your parents moveable possessions and how they would want them to be distributed.

4) The house conversation dealing with your parents plans to either stay in their home or move somewhere else.

5) The professional care conversation and the kind of care they would want.

6) The legacy conversation that will get parents thinking about their lives, achievements and the legacy they wish to leave.

No doubt, all of these issues are at times somewhat daunting, and as Taylor states: “talking to the elderly about aging is a lot like talking to the poor about poverty; no matter how delicately we approach the subject, we run the risk of scaring, offending, or outright alienating them merely by bringing it up.” Consequently, initiating the parent care conversations is not a matter in deciding when these conversations should take place but how they should be held.

Throughout the book, Taylor emphasizes that you must avoid the pitfall of coming across as intrusive where you bulldoze your feelings and opinions onto your parents. This approach is guaranteed to turn them off and probably shut them down completely. Instead, Taylor presents the parent care conversations in a way that is designed to open up the doors of communication between parents and children in order to arrive at a clear, mutual understanding of each one’s respective feelings about the issue of future care. 

As we live longer, the chances grow that parents will some day be in need of care. It is very common today where daughters and sons find themselves called upon to help care for their aging parents. This commitment may be of short duration or it may last for years. Roles are now reversed and responsibilities as well as feelings within the family can be complicated and confusing unless there is adequate preparation.

Written in a clear, upbeat, conversational style, The Parent Care Conversation: Six Strategies for Transforming the Emotional and Financial Future of Your Aging Parents will certainly prove to be of immense help to those of us who have aging parents and who have never broached the six conversations with them.

The above review was contributed by:  NORM GOLDMAN:  Editor & Publisher of Bookpleasures.  Here are more of  Norm Goldman's Reviews