Go a little further

LEARN · GUIDE

Help and advice for carers

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

Information and advice

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

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

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

Fault Lines

Karl Pillemer

Pillemer's research on family estrangement and repair, based on interviews with hundreds of families rather than on theory.

READ · BOOK

The Generative Society

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

Intergenerational Solidarity and the Structure of Adult Child–Parent Relationships

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.