Home Instead Senior Care has commenced a new public education campaign to help family carers. “Our research and day to day experience shows there are many people worried about their ageing parents and are trying to care for  someone who says they’d rather not have any help at all” says local franchise owner Sarah Warner.

“This resistance can be a real problem for family carers – they can be worried about the safety of a senior loved one forgetting food on the stove or neglecting to take their medications. We are spreading the message that keeping fiercely independent seniors safe at home isn’t a lost cause; there are solutions for them and their family carers.”

The campaign includes a free a resource booklet When Seniors Say No! – overcoming resistance to assistance and features practical tips and insights.

The Home Instead Senior Care survey revealed that 42% of carers spend more than 30 hours a week caregiving. And that’s what makes countering that resistance to assistance so important. “Many times family carers make assumptions but never ask: ‘Mum, I’ve noticed that every time I bring up having someone come in to assist, you don’t want help”.

Why is that?

Sometimes the parent doesn’t realize they’re being resistant. Also, reassuring a senior loved one that you have the same goal in mind will help. Start with something like: ‘My goal for you is to be independent, too. You know I can’t be here all the time. A little extra assistance will help you stay at home.’”

You can download the resource booklet When Seniors Say “No!” from the Home Instead website.

Guest Post from Dr Ann Villers:

‘Don’t get to your grave with your song unsung’. So said American speaker Cavett Robert. It’s my favourite saying. Why? Because it challenges me to think about the big questions in life. Why am I here? What do I want to achieve while I’m walking this planet?

I’m a baby boomer and I’m keenly aware that there is now more life behind me than potentially ahead. So I find myself pondering what’s important to me, what would I still like to do. And I’m not alone in this. Plenty of people, not just baby boomers, wonder about what their song is and whether they are singing it.

We don’t just have one song in life. We could be singing multiple songs at different stages of life. The songs you sing as an unattached, free-ranging 20 something will differ from young parents juggling jobs and bills. Stacks of songs are possible for baby boomers, depending on whether you’re an empty nester, need to care for elderly relatives, have an interesting job, are in good health, operate a business or have a mortgage. What I find though, is at some point people start thinking: Is this all there is? They have a sense that at some deep, personal level, something is missing. Of all the songs they’ve been singing, ‘their song’ has yet to be sung. Retirement provides an opportunity to sing it.

While you’re busy juggling many demands, you may not have given much, if any, thought to that period of life called ‘retirement’. Why would you? You’re still working and there seems no pressing need to consider the next stage of life into your sixties and early seventies. And certainly there’s no time to think about it, let alone plan. Yet planning doesn’t have to take a lot of time, nor be completed in one sitting. But it does need to be done.

Retirement is a process

Retirement has traditionally been regarded as an event, marking a distinct phase of life, when full-time work stopped, and people moved into a life of leisure and relaxation. This model of retirement, with its cold turkey exit from the workforce, may still apply to some, but with the line between working full-time and not working blurring, baby boomers need to consider their options.

Retirement is now more a process than an event. Without some planning, the risk is that people retire from what they are doing, without having a clear idea of how they will retire and what they are retiring to.

How do you find your song?

Planning for retirement is just as complex and important a process as deciding what occupation or profession to embark on in the first place. We place much emphasis on asking the young ‘What would you like to do when you grow up?’ This is not a once-only question. It’s also a question that can have different answers each time it is asked. Pre-retirees also need to ask themselves, What do I want to do now? What is my song now and for the next couple of decades?

I suggest baby boomers become ‘career activists’. These are people who take charge of their life, thinking through what retirement means, how they want to live it and creating their own path to find it.

Why become a career activist?

Three reasons come to mind as to why baby boomers should take charge of their careers:

Firstly, each of us needs to work out for ourselves what retirement means. What comes to mind when you ponder retirement? Is it positive or negative? Whose retirements have you observed? What would you like to emulate or do differently than these retirements?

Secondly, retirement is a major life change. Our roles, relationships, daily routines all evolve. Retirement involves a transition between two significantly different stages of our lives. Drifting into retirement with no clear plan, hoping it will evolve on its own, is a poor recipe. Career activists have the skills to handle this change so as to obtain the best possible outcome.

Thirdly, this transition is stressful. Three areas cause stress in retirement. People underestimate the emotional impact. Do you understand what you are leaving behind? Will you miss your job title and all those problems you face at work? Stress also comes from a lack of fulfilling activities. Have you thought about the loss of structure to your day? Will playing golf be enough? Yet another source of stress is the change in family dynamics. How much time do you really want to spend with your spouse or partner? In short, can you imagine rising each day with the same anticipation you experience during your working career?

There’s much to think about for a pre-retiree career activist. The main task is to make sense of retirement in the context of your own life. The popular image of the happy retired couple strolling hand in hand at sunset along a pristine beach may fit and be attainable. Then again, you may wish to join the grey nomads touring the country, topping up the coffers with casual farm labour, such as fruit picking. Or you may wish to indulge some long-neglected hobbies. Any of these are worthy songs so long as you’ve thought them through.

Naturalist Diane Ackerman said: ‘I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well’. Part of the breadth and depth of life is singing your song.

What will your song be?

Dr Ann Villiers, learning guide, professional speaker and author, is Australia’s only Mental Nutritionist® specialising in mind and language practices that help people build flexible thinking, confident speaking and quality connections with people. Visit www.mentalnutrition.com to learn more about Mental Nutrition. Visit www.selectioncriteria.com.au for free resources unlocking the mysteries of public service jobs.

The biggest demographic shift of the 21st century is under way. In 1900, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was 47 years. Now it’s closer to 80, and many of today’s children could live to 100. This gift of longevity represents a big and permanent shift in American life — one that may require a new set of rules.

Social visionary Marc Freedman, founder of the Civic Ventures think tank in San Francisco, recalls his own aha moment three years ago. As a 50-year-old father of two young boys, Freedman booked a hotel room for a family vacation using his AARP discount and requested two cribs. “There are a growing number of us who can be classified as neither-nors,” Freedman, now a father of three, writes in his new book, The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife. “Neither young nor old. Neither ready to retire nor able to afford it.”

New opportunities

The first wave of baby-boomers turn 65 this year and the looming demands of 78 million seniors in the US threaten to swamp Social Security and Medicare. Some warn that the financial stress could cripple the economy and ignite a battle between people with walkers and those pushing baby strollers. But Freedman believes the unprecedented aging of America presents an opportunity to redefine the golden years for boomers and the generations that follow.

A yet-unnamed chapter of life is evolving for people between middle age and old age — much the way that adolescence was first recognized as a distinct developmental stage in the early 20th century. Many of today’s 65-year-olds are vibrant, active and engaged. Rather than retiring to a golf-course community and living off their savings for 20 years or more — an impossible scenario for many in the wake of the Great Recession — some are searching for a second act that combines meaningful work and a paycheck.

Freedman calls this new life phase the “encore years.” A few years ago, he launched a national conversation with his thought-provoking book Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life. The companion Web site offers advice on switching directions in midlife and inspirational stories of individuals who carved a new path. Recent research sponsored by Civic Ventures suggests that there could be labor shortages by 2018 if boomers retire at traditional ages, particularly in education, health care, government and nonprofit organizations.

In The Big Shift, Freedman offers a recipe for transforming America’s coming midlife crisis into an opportunity for individuals and society. “Never before have so many people had so much experience and the time and capacity to do something significant with it,” he writes. He outlines out-of-the-box ideas, such as “gap years” for grown-ups; new kinds of internships and fellowships for Americans moving beyond middle age; remodeled higher education to help retrain people for these new roles; and new kinds of investment accounts to finance the cost of transitioning to new careers.

Sound like an impossible dream? No, it’s more like practical idealism, based on Freedman’s decade-plus-long mission to link experienced people who are eager to make a difference with nonprofit organizations in need of leadership. He spearheaded the creation of Experience Corps, a national service program for people over 55, and created the Purpose Prize, which annually provides five $100,000 prizes to social innovators in the second half of life.

If the golden-years dream was once freedom from work, the dream of this new wave is the freedom to work, says Freedman. The oldest boomers may be the lab rats in this longevity experiment, but every generation will benefit from new rules and roles for those who are beyond middle age but still too young to be old.

Article by Mary Beth Franklin, senior editor at Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
Read more: http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/too-young-to-be-old.html#ixzz1PbDDE2Cd