Caring for Your Parents: The Complete Family Guide

Hugh Delehanty and Elinor Ginzler. Caring for Your Parents: The Complete Family Guide. AARP and Sterling Publishing, New York, NY. 2008. 238 pages.

$10.36 from Amazon

As parents age, their adult children are often forced to take on an active caregiving role, which creates a new dynamic between parent and child. Caring for Your Parents provides practical advice to help adult children navigate this complex emotional and bureaucratic terrain.

Written by two experts on long-term care and caregiving from the AARP, Caring for Your Parents is full of useful tips as well as personal, touching stories of innovative strategies real people have found to manage the challenges of caregiving. Among the topics covered are talking to parents about aging, dealing with siblings, being an advocate for a parent, coping with Medicare, finding suitable living arrangements, preparing for death, and mourning. The chapters are peppered with facts and key questions that can help children keep their parents safe from consumer scams, evaluate long-term care options, and choose a financial planner, among other matters.

Caring for Your Parents is a well-written, easy-to-read book that would be helpful for anyone who is, or soon will be, among the estimated 30 million Americans caring for an elderly person.