Taking Care of Parents Who Didn't Take Care of You: Making Peace with Aging Parents [Paperback]

Eleanor Cade (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 2002

Caring for aging parents is difficult--it's exhausting, expensive, time-consuming, and under appreciated. And that's under the best of circumstances, when the caregiver loves and respects his or her aging parent. What happens when adult children are asked to care for elderly parents who were abusive, neglectful, or absent?

Here is a compassionate and practical guide to facing the psychological and emotional issues that arise when caring for aging parents. Eleanor Cade offers sound advice as well as personal accounts from individuals who have made the choice to care for difficult parents. The result is a powerful guide to moving beyond feelings of anger, regret, and grief in order to build healthy new family dynamics based on decency and mercy.

Target audience
For individuals who are caring for aging, dysfunctional parents, as well as counselors and therapists who work with families

Features

• an authoritative resource for baby boomers caring for aging parents
• defines differences between "normal" and "dysfunctional" families
• personal stories validate the experiences and feelings of readers

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Eleanor Cade specializes in editorial services for publishers. She has coauthored, ghostwritten, and edited many books in the self-help and recovery fields.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Hazelden Publishing (September 23, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568388799
• ISBN-13: 978-1568388793
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #597,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important Book!, April 23, 2006

By 

Libertarian Wonk (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Taking Care of Parents Who Didn't Take Care of You: Making Peace with Aging Parents (Paperback)

Indeed, Cade asks us, how do you take care of your parents, when they didn't take good care of you - and in fact may done have you harm?

Cade, through interviews with adult caregivers and mental health professionals, encourages us to use the grieving process for the care-givers experience. Denial, Anger, Acceptance, and (eventually) Gratitude are stages in grieving that are broadly accepted in the mental health community. The call to action, if you want to call it that, is to find a motive for taking care of troubled parents that you can live with and live for.

If you have unresolved issues with your parents, this book might challenge you to move beyond your (legitimate) anger and defenses. The surprising news is there are a quite a few of us who are challenged with taking care of our troubled and troubling parents.

I was surprised, for example, to read that some caregivers she interviewed thank their parents for modeling how not to live and act. If you're ready to do the work of emotionally evolving and taking care of emotionally damaging parents, I recommend this book.

35 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Barefly Scratches the Surface, April 10, 2006

By 

Daphne Stevens (Macon, GA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Taking Care of Parents Who Didn't Take Care of You: Making Peace with Aging Parents (Paperback)

The book barely scratches the surface. While the author does give helpful comments on the importance of siblings offering mutual support in caregiving, she offers a rather superficial nod to the experience of being re-engaged in the overwhelming world of one's pathological (now crisis-driven) family-of-origin.

Guilt, anxiety, grief, and helplessness are not just part of eldercare in these families. They are ghosts of the childhood helplessness and dispair that have often drained emotional reserves.

Most healthy adult survivors of chaotic families have devoted their lives to making peace with their parents, living with integrity and compassion, and creating healthy relationships. The return to the family of origin, the barrage of unsolvable problems and crises, the prospect of uneneding needs and demands, the double-binding parents who simultaneously complain and refuse help, is a nightmarish flashback for some adult children. They are likely to receive rather cold comfort in this book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Taking care of Parents Who Didn't take care of you, September 9, 2008

By 

SHARON DIXON (TUCSON, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Taking Care of Parents Who Didn't Take Care of You: Making Peace with Aging Parents (Paperback)

This is the most worthless piece of drivel I have ever read. The description is very misleading. It does nothing but serve up platitudes, with no concrete steps to resolving a problem. Every instance ends up the same-forgive them, look in the mirror and tell yourself you are doing your best, ad nauseam. It does give examples of many situations encountered in caring for our parents- it just fails to give constructive ways to handle them. If I could give a no star rating, I would have for this book.