to feel they are gradually losing touch with the ever-changing realities of the outside world. Adult children in the prime of life may have a better grasp of the current economic challenges or financial realities of the day. At eighty-five or ninety, a person’s mental faculties are often not all they once were. When an older person is aware of this, they might decide to let a capable and trustworthy adult child take over some or all of the financial decisions—maybe handling the investments and doing the income tax calculations—sometimes in conjunction with a fiduciary or financial advisor.
As with a residential move, some older parents see financial help as “interference.” There may be strong denial their behavior has changed, even with clear evidence such as an unfiled tax return or the purchase of a peculiar item. The parent’s denial makes monitoring the situation more difficult for the adult child who must find a way to check up on the parent without causing too much conflict.
Legal Representation
Children are most often named first on durable power-of-attorney documents (DPOA) for financial matters and health care decisions. A DPOA allows them to have legal proxy for all decisions in one or both of these domains, meaning their signature is treated as the parent’s own. Barring a lack of trust among family members, the child named on the document may be the one considered by the parent as the most competent in that area, the one living the closest, or the one considered the most astute or fair.
Bill Paying and Handling Money
An adult child often takes over money management when a parent requests help or starts displaying diminished cognitive abilities. This kind of decline shows up when a person discovers the parent has not been paying bills on time or has been writing checks to unknown recipients. The adult child then takes over the checking account and begins to shift credit information, redirecting bills and financial statements to himself or another of the adult children. Adam’s mother, in her late eighties, was aware of her diminishing capacity to handle her own day-to-day financial affairs and asked him for help:
Adam took over his eighty-nine-year-old mother’s finances after she had a debilitating stroke. Even before the stroke she had started to talk about giving up her driver’s license and was asking Adam to help her with household tasks on a more frequent basis. When the stroke occurred, she became unable to speak or write for four months. Adam recalls having her legal power of attorney a “Godsend.” The POA allowed him to get his name added to all her accounts, manage her income, pay her bills, file her taxes, and wade through the mountain of medical bills and statements that arrived daily. He was also able to arrange for her in-home long-term care and to pay himself and his other siblings for out-of-pocket expenses that occurred in the first few days of her hospitalization. After his mother recovered most of her mobility and some of her speech, Adam continued to manage her finances, and his mother expressed relief and gratitude that she had someone to take over for her.
To a great extent, involvement like Adam’s in the life of his mother will also protect her (and the estate) from financial scams by those who prey on older citizens.
Medication Management and Help With the Activities of Daily Living
Managing and monitoring medications, ensuring there is food available, and help with personal hygiene are all areas where assistance is often needed as aging parents progress into their final years. In elder care residential communities, staff provide many of these services, yet the adult children continue to take their parents shopping (or shop for them), accompany them to medical appointments, pick up prescriptions, help them put on a nice outfit for a family visit, etc.
Who will be there to help us with these things as we age? The many responsibilities and activities adult children undertake on behalf of their aging parents provide clues to how we should prepare for a later time—a time when we may not be quite as mentally sharp or as physically able as we are today.
The Social Network
As we age, our social network plays a very big role in our well-being. Parents, no matter their age, may include in their social network their children, their children’s friends, the parents of their children’s friends, their children’s in-laws, their grandchildren, and so on. One can imagine how easily and organically this network grows, even with just one or two kids. Those without children, on the other hand, create their social network by design, often including friends, colleagues, neighbors, church members, and other like-minded people as well as any siblings and those offspring interested in staying close.
During the years when parents are changing diapers, helping with homework, and playing chauffeur, those of us who are child-free are developing outside interests, deepening friendships, building their careers, and sometimes playing a role in developing their communities.
The following diagram illustrates the make-up of a typical older parent’s social network. The stronger the tie, the darker and wider the connector:
Where does this leave the rest of us? Ties with friends, siblings, nieces and nephews and even community tend to be (and should be) more prominent for us. During the years when parents are changing diapers, helping with homework, and playing chauffeur, those of us who are child-free are developing outside interests, deepening friendships, building careers, and sometimes playing a role in developing communities. Of course, parents also may have strong ties with friends and others who are unrelated, but they are rarely the primary connections in their lives.
Isolation and loneliness are the two biggest risks for poor mental health in later life.
The following diagram illustrates a typical social network for an older adult without children. As in the diagram of the older parent, the heavy, bold lines illustrate strong ties; the lighter ones illustrate looser, more tenuous connections.
Your own diagram may differ from this one. Everyone has a unique network because no two families are exactly the same, nor are any two individuals.
Research studies over the past twenty years tell us that older adults without children are no different in psychological well-being than those with children.8
Child-free adults have found ways to develop healthy social networks as well as methods for coping with difficult situations and solving thorny later-life problems. This healthy psychological make-up bodes well for our ability to cope with the challenges of being older … if we plan well. These studies also find adults without children are no less satisfied with their lives than older parents.
Isolation and loneliness are the two biggest risks for poor mental health in later life, but again, older parents can be as isolated and lonely as those without children.9 In fact, some parents reported greater loneliness than those who are childless when their expectations of their adult children went unfulfilled.
Life satisfaction, well-being, and good mental health in later life are all dependent on a social support system of one sort or another, and not necessarily from adult children.10 In the end, adult children are not a guarantee of safety and security in later life. At best, children are a safety net, which may or may not hold up under the weight of the many obligations that can be incurred.
What does all this mean? Those of us without children are as likely as our friends who are parents to be successful and satisfied throughout our lifespan. However, we need to figure out in advance how we will manage the challenges of aging and whom we can engage to help us.
The remainder of this book focuses on being proactive about planning—for where we will live, how we will manage our money, who will represent us when we can no longer speak
