Hosted by Daisy McAndrew and Annabel James. Welcome to Age and Stage, a new podcast for everybody, caring for or supporting their elderly, parents, relatives, friends, even neighbours.
You can also find this Age Space Podcast episode and more on Apple Podcasts.
We’ll bring you practical guidance, expert help and inspiration to help navigate all aspects of elderly care and old age. We’ll tackle a different subject in conversation with guest experts; the different kinds of care, the money side of things, the legal side of things, everything you need to think about the practicalities of helping parents and relatives remain living independently and safely for as long as possible at home.
With Age and Stage we want to be those friendly voices helping people find answers, or if there aren’t answers yet, just saying we get it. Subjects such as having the driving conversation, getting a diagnosis of dementia, we’ll discuss family dynamics, and plans to put in place. We’ll talk about death, grief and those times when things go wrong, and how we can help you find a way through it.
Age and Stage won’t be a gloom fest. We’re going to talk to experts about holidays, gardening, food and, importantly, gadgets and gizmos to help make the everyday easier and the lighter side of getting older.
Agespace.org
We set up www.agespace.org to help other people to find the right information and resources. A one-stop shop where you can get practical advice, but also not be alone. There are amazing organisations and extraordinary people doing great work every day of the week to help, whether that’s about funding care or some of the legal issues, or for people living with dementia.
How do you know you’ve become a carer?
When do you go from just being a son or a daughter or a niece or nephew to a carer? Somebody who might pop around once a week and take some shopping, they’re not necessarily a carer, but they’re still going out of their way to help somebody who perhaps can’t do their own shopping.
Planning ahead - parenting your parents
It’s about paying a bit more attention when you go home, what’s the fridge looking like? If things start to be out of their sell-by date, or there isn’t much food in the fridge. And somebody who was always very house proud, it starts feeling different, smelling different. Is the post being opened?
You know it when you see it, if mum’s looking a bit more dishevelled than usual. Maybe talk to the neighbours, or a cleaner, and then if you can recognise a bit of what might be happening, it’s then trying to start those conversations.
Three Questions to ask to start planning ahead for elderly care.
There are three questions that, if you can ask them, do, which is,
- Where do you want to live? Do you want to stay in your own home? Would you think about down-sizing, or do you want to come and move in with me?
- The second question is, let’s think about care in the abstract for now, if you’re going to need care, what would you like? Would you have people living in? Do you only want people who come in the day? Is there a care home locally that everybody would like to go into should they need to?
- And then the third question is how’s that going to be paid for?
The demographics of an ageing population
Millions more in the next 10 years will be over 85 and all the issues that that brings with it. And the sandwich generation, teenage kids and a mother in her mid 80s with a lot of mobility issues and some memory issues.Many of us have children later and your parents need a lot of help at the same time.
There are more women working, working longer. A lot of us living further away. Back in the old days, people didn’t move so far away. It’s between seven and 10 million people providing unpaid care every week for an elderly parent or relative.
And from this year there are going to be more people in the workplace with elderly dependents than those with childcare responsibilities. The Carers Leave Act came in last year that gives everybody in employment a week of unpaid care leave every year. But we’ve got a long way to go before it’s like maternity or paternity leave.
Siblings and family dynamics
One of the themes is siblings, when you are caring for somebody and the resentment that seems to bubble over in so many families between the one who feels like he or she is doing the lion’s. It’s not just the relationship between you and your parent or the person you’re caring for, but between you and the rest of your family that is fraught with danger and problems.
Every family is different. Try and share the responsibility before you need to. Somebody’s living in Australia, maybe they can do the finances, or, if somebody’s really close, they look after the home, and somebody else might look after the actual care. It’s about playing to people’s strengths so that everybody does feel they have an involvement, but also responsibility to be involved.
Loneliness in old age
By the very nature of ageing your social circle gets smaller and smaller as your friends die. A friend of mum’s said that every year she was determined to make a younger friend, because she wanted to ensure her future social life. But a lot of the older generation either find it too difficult to keep up with their friends, or want to rely on their nearest and dearest, but you do want to encourage a social life, and sometimes the pressure on you to be that social life as well as the carer is huge.
Caring for the carer
And there is also the thinking my parent has changed. You look at this person who was the life and soul, somebody you emulated, and probably are very like, and you see them changing, and it can be difficult to deal with that aspect. It’s almost like the grieving process starts before and you don’t necessarily recognise it for what that is.
In that instance, then you really are grieving when they’re still alive. We’ll be asking some real experts on how to deal with that for yourself, because you also have to look after yourself, number one, because if you can’t look after yourself, you can’t care for somebody else.
Get in touch with Age & Stage
You can email the show at [email protected],
Record a voice note here: https://www.speakpipe.com/ageandstage
WhatsApp us – 07982 360113
Please share Age & Stage with a friend, or someone you know who would be helped by the information in this series. You can send them this link: https://pod.link/1798413657
More information on all this and more at www.agespace.org
