As Our Parents Age

About

October 2009 – Updated March 2010

As Our Parents Age is my effort to record the experiences of loving and living with aging parents, but it is also a vehicle to help my husband and me understand and learn more about aging parent caregiving. I am highlighting interesting issues, identifying high quality web resources, and sharing memories. Other posts are on topics that my husband and I would have liked to know more about at the beginning of our foray into the aging child – aging parent phase of life.

I am not selling anything to my readers. I have no financial interest in goods or services for aging parents or their adult children, and my blog at this time has no advertising other than ads that WordPress might attach for some readers. On occasion I have provided technology support for senior citizens, sometimes receiving a small stipend, however I am not promoting my technology skills. As a long-time teacher I enjoy writing and re-writing, and I am good at research. I have taught just about every age from preschool to elderly senior adult — altogether more than 30 years of teaching experience — and have earned undergraduate and graduate degrees.

As Our Parents Age aims to post information that is useful to adult children who are experiencing or entering the aging parent/caregiving life phase (that we are living through right now), however I am not a professional in the field of aging or geriatrics. N.B. I recently began work on another blog – Media! Tech! Parenting! — which focuses on my long experience and professional work in the educational technology field, and it shares many observations and ideas gleaned from working with digitally native children and helping their thinking about how parenting strategies change in the digital world.

With As Our Parents Age my intention is not to keep a journal or to aspire to replace comprehensive resource sites on aging. Instead, these short, sometimes personal posts, accompanied by a few resources, can help others understand the basics of a particular subject, learn about a resource, or learn where to go to find more information. Please take a minute to look at some of the resources links that are attached to blog posts, and refer to the Disclosure page for more information about this blog.

We never stop learning. As a teacher my inclination is to encourage people to learn more. In this case, the more we all learn about the aging parent caregiving period of our lives, the more we help family members move gracefully through the aging process. Along the way we can also become effective advocates. Perhaps in the process we can even dispel a few of our own fears about getting older.

I hope this blog will pay tribute to the amazing people in our families, individuals who are experiencing the later years of their lives. The aging process makes them no less amazing.

Mother's Day Tea, May 2010

January 2010 – Books and Article Reviews

And there are so many books to read and review and articles to share. When I began this blog in October 2009 I was especially focused on books about the brain, because I am teacher, and also because one of our parents suffers from dementia.

March 2010

Our parent with dementia died early in 2010, and many of the experiences related to end-of-life are recorded here.