Women and Aging: Adult Children Caring for Aging Parents: Factors to Consider

Caring for our aging parents can be frightening, challenging and rewarding all at the same time. For the parent requiring additional assistance, maintaining some degree of independence is crucial to their own emotional and physical well being. However, the truth about aging is that, with age, comes many life altering health complications which can lead to a greater conflict in where or when a parent should begin to relinquish some degree of dependence. For adult children, creating our own theories of aging, will provide for a cleaner transition when moving an aging parent into your home thereby assisting an aging parent in successful aging.

Commonly, the first issue, between parent and adult child, to be addressed is the issue of driving. Within major metropolitan cities, driving is not so much of an issue as it is in the U.S. cities without public transportation. For this reason, knowing when to discontinue driving rights of an aging adult is important to ensuring not only their safety but the safety of others.

In the psychology of aging, the driving rights are commonly one of the hardest issues to address with an aging parent as it generally marks the beginning of time in which a parent must relinquish some form of independence. Often, grandchildren can provide a better approach to encouraging a grandparent to give up driving and, instead, allow others to drive for them. What is important to understand is that this may be the first time in a child's life when you must use forceful approaches in removing driving privileges from a parent who is unwilling to voluntarily give up the option to drive.