Parenting Your Parents
Guest Blog: Parenting Your Parents
As life expectancy rises, we’re finding ourselves looking after not only our young family but our parents too. Parenting our parents is new territory for us – how do we best look after the people who have always cared for us?
Jessica Silver from ElWell provides support and information to people looking after their parents as they get older. So we spoke with her for advice to help understand how to parent our parents.
When do the tables turn?
You have your parents’ best interests at heart, so it makes sense that you want them to stay healthy and well and don’t over-stretch themselves. But we need to make sure we don’t project our worries and concerns about them getting older onto them unnecessarily. Don’t just assume because they’ve reached a certain age that they should be winding down. Yes, they may need to – and then a conversation should be had – but don’t enter the caregiver...
The Greatest Love of All
Whether you believe in a Higher Power, God, the connectedness of all things or nothing at all, your relationship with yourself is inevitably going to be the most enduring human relationship of your life! If we can't find love and compassion for the flawed yet vulnerable essence of ourselves, what hope do we have of loving others... or being happy?
This Valentine's Day my Facebook feed is filled with posts about
- how loved the poster feels because an extravagant gesture has been made by a loved one and
- how sad and unloved the poster feels because they either don't have someone to make that extravagant gesture, or whose love interest just doesn't play the game and
- exhortations to self love
But what does that mean, exactly? (Don't be rude, you at the back!)
First of all, what is "Valentine's Day"? Let's have a quick look at all the elements that make up this annual festival of love and misery: St Valentine, Cupid, roses, hearts and cards.
- Legend has it that a Christian priest,...
