Last year, we discovered a highly disturbing article on the website HealthDay that put an ominous spin on the recent chorus of headlines about the nation’s opioid crisis. According to two government reports released in 2018, a growing number of seniors are falling prey to this insidious category of highly addictive painkillers. Because this problem…
One of the biggest dilemmas facing adult children involves dealing with a parent’s initial signs of cognitive decline. At first, it’s easy to dismiss mom’s forgetfulness or dad’s angry outbursts, but over time it becomes clear that things aren’t what they used to be. Faced with this situation, the adult kids encounter a host of…
Do you remember the television ads from the 1980s for a product called LifeAlert? It showed a woman on the floor yelling, “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” These ads introduced millions of late-night television viewers to a whole new (at the time) product category: simple hand-held medical alert devices. Wear them around…
Which is more important – helping out your adult kids with their financial needs, or preparing to meet your own needs in retirement? Plenty of boomer parents are asking themselves that question these days. They’re struggling to bolster their own often-meager retirement savings while offering financial support to adult children who may be having difficulty…
Is dying at home overrated? That’s the provocative subtitle that brought a recent New York Times article to our attention. In survey after survey, most Americans say they prefer to die in their own homes, and conventional wisdom says that the familiar environment of home and family is the optimum place to pass away. But…
According to the Alzheimer’s Association (www.alz.org) one senior in three passes away with some form of dementia – and those numbers are increasing. So that presents a pretty strong likelihood that an aging person you love will at some point have to deal with the effects of cognitive impairment. Every month there are many articles…
Here on the AgingOptions blog, we’ve written before about the overwhelming burden being borne by the nation’s caregivers. Because this burden of caregiving affects so many aspects of our society, we feel this an important story to revisit from time to time. Chances are good that you and your family are impacted by this issue…
It’s difficult to pinpoint the actual number of aging parents who – either by choice or by necessity – are moving in with their adult children, but the figure is definitely on the rise. We decided to take a look at this “reverse boomerang effect,” as some have called it, in order to let our…
It may have happened to a senior loved one, or even to you. In a fairly short period of time, a person changes from being lucid and aware to being confused and agitated. They can’t think clearly or remember where they are or what they’re doing, and they have difficulty recalling even recent events. The…
We love to run across news stories that show how the simplest of ideas can have a tremendous impact, and that’s how we felt some months back as we read this heart-warming article published earlier this year on the BBC News website. We thought it would be a good article to bring back and share…