Resources
Everything worth your time on the question: What happens when the child becomes the carer?
Six things on this subject: five things to read and one free service or course. Practical support sits first, before anything written to be interesting. Most people caring for a parent are entitled to more support than they have claimed.
This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.
Roles are changing: talk it throughLEARN · GUIDE
Carers UK
Most people caring for a parent are entitled to more support than they have claimed.
Practical guidance on carer's assessments, benefits, work and looking after your own health.
READ · GUIDE
Age UK
Useful when the practical questions are the ones actually keeping you awake.
Care, money, housing and health guidance for older people and their families.
READ · BOOK
William Bridges
Read this if something has already ended and you are embarrassed that you still have no idea what comes next.
Bridges separates change, which is the external event, from transition, which is the slower internal business of letting go of who you were while it happens. His most useful claim is that the empty middle stretch is not a failure to move on. It is the part of the process where the next thing actually gets worked out, and rushing it usually produces a decision you reverse later.
READ · BOOK
Karl Pillemer
Pillemer's research on family estrangement and repair, based on interviews with hundreds of families rather than on theory.
READ · BOOK
Dan McAdams and Ed de St Aubin
Best for the impulse to be useful to people who come after you.
McAdams has spent a career on generativity, the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation. His work shows it is not confined to parents and not confined to later life, and that people who have it tend to tell a particular kind of story about themselves. Useful for locating contribution you already make and have never counted.
READ · RESEARCH
Merril Silverstein and Vern Bengtson
The study that separates affection, contact, obligation and practical help instead of treating family closeness as one thing. Useful when a role changes but the relationship does not.
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.