Customer Reviews

Are Your Parents Driving You Crazy? How to Resolve the Most Common Dilemmas with Aging Parents

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Joseph Ilardo and Carole Rothman effectively collaborate in Are Your Parents Driving You Crazy? to show stressed out adult children how to resolve the most common and frequently encountered dilemmas that arise from efforts to care their aging parents. Cogent, insightful, practical, and competent problem solving advice, suggestions, and observations are provided when an aging parent can no longer safely drives but is refusing to quit; detrimentally skimps on expenses even though they are not poverty stricken; refuse to see a doctor or ignore medical advice; want to move in with their children; antagonize home health aides and other support workers; are unwilling to discuss vital end-of-life issues and decisions; and more. Also of great and enduring value is the advice on handling adult siblings who refuse to help in the care and problems of the aging parent; resent the time spent caring for a parent; disagree, discourage, or undermine parental care efforts; steals from the parent, and more. If you are undertaking the responsibilities of caring for an aging parent, begin with a careful reading of Joseph Ilardo and Carole Rothman's Are Your Parents Driving You Crazy? It will save you immense amounts of stressful anxiety and bewildered frustration -- as well as substantially improve the quality and effectiveness of your efforts in behalf of your aging parent.

At last, real solutions to the reality of the day-to-day problems/frustration when dealing with aging parents who are "DRIVING YOU CRAZY!" Great title, easy to read, valuable advice, and it really helped me cope better. The other book I also highly recommend is "Elder Rage," which is fun to read because it is filled with humor about this most heart-breaking subject. Both books will get you through it!

Are your parents driving you crazy? Have you shouldered too much responsibility for their care? Do your siblings ignore the problems? Is your own family suffering? Llardo and Rothman have devised a method to help you arrive at solutions to these and other common problems that face caregivers.

Before those problems get completely out of control, get and read this book. The method the authors propose has worked for others - it can work for you if you take the time to follow their method and do the problem/solution work. You don't have to be a martyr to your caregiving duties.

Phyllis Staff, Ph.D.
author, "How to Find Great Senior Housing"
and
"128 Ways to Prevent Alzheimer's and Other Dementias"

This book would be helpful to anyone who has elderly parents. I like that it emphasizes respect and consideration for the aging parent, including the aging parent in the decisions and first of all getting everyone involved to agree there really is a problem. It outlines a plan for thinking through the particular problem and looking at all the possible solutions. It has separate chapters listed for specific common problems and gives an example of using the problem solving model. It contains resources for additional help if needed.

I followed the basic strategy of this book with my dad and after he died, wrote My Funny Dad, Harry in his memory which includes how we dealt with some of the struggles mentioned in this book. Consequently, we had a close relationship to the end.