Take them flowers, give them a hug, say thank you… sincerely. They did their best, now let’s do our best to honor them.

What are you going to do this Mother’s Day?

By Olivia Li | April 16, 2012 16:35

The optimistic view of a golden retirement has become tarnished for a growing number of baby boomers, due to changing inter-generational factors: as their parents live longer and their children take their time becoming fully independent, this so-called sandwich-generation is feeling the squeeze from all sides.At the same time, many are struggling to hold onto their jobs, their retirement savings and the long cherished dreams that go with personal and financial freedom in retirement, such as travelling and special interests.

Financial advisors are well placed to help the sandwich generation tackle these challenges, particularly the need to protect their own nest eggs while still providing for their families. Unfortunately, not all baby boomer clients are aware — or willing to face — the trade-offs this may require.

“There’s a real dilemma of trying to make this issue resonate with enough vigour that the client actually wants to do something,” says Bart Mindszenthy, an eldercare expert based in Toronto. “Some of them don’t realize the gravity of what they’re getting into. There’s this reluctance to look deeper into their own personal lives.”

Part of the problem is the growing reality that family obligations just seem to keep going, decade after decade. “The challenges associated with caring for your family don’t appear to diminish at all with age — even when [the baby boomer is] in retirement,” notes Kathryn Del Greco, vice president and investment advisor with TD Waterhouse Private Investment Advice in Toronto.

StatsCan reveals 51% of young adults between the ages of 20 to 29 are still living with their parents. The figure reaches 60% in the case of those between the ages of 20 to 24.

“[Dependent] children are much older now and yet are still financially dependent on parents,” says Del Greco.

Just as the return of adult children to the family home can be unexpected, the costs of eldercare are often an underestimated expense.

Says Mindszenthy: “I know a number of people who have to pay $4,000 to $6,000 a month so their parents can live in an above-average, assisted-living facility. To the average boomer, these [are costs] they never put aside or planned for.”

The same applies to hiring part-time help for elderly parents who wish to stay in their own homes as along as possible. “[Their children] are going to be paying $22 to $25 an hour,” adds Mindszenthy. “So, now they have to ask themselves, how many hours do their parents need and how many are they able to afford?”

Not surprisingly, a recent poll by Credit Canada and Capital One Canada found that baby boomers caught in the sandwich felt obligated to cut back their own standard of living to support both family layers. The poll found that 30% were taking fewer vacations, 43% were eating out less often, 36% had to dip into their savings, and 37% were working more hours.

And providing care directly to elderly parents may have its own costs. “I find those who care for their parents are often overlooked for raises and advancements because they’re viewed as not as ‘dependable’ by their employers,” Mindszenthy says.

As baby boomers prepare for retirement, the rates of return on investments add another layer of concern. The current low-rate interest environment is already a restraint on the income of many boomers who have retired and want to maintain a low-risk, conservative investing profile, according to Del Greco.

“They may not be able to generate the type of income they’re comfortable with, from GIC investing and the like,” says Del Greco. “So, their investment returns are already severely impacted.”

This is the first in a three-part series on the sandwich generation. Tomorrow: Planning for eldercare.

Here are five questions for Caregivers that RetirementHomes.com posed to leading caregiver advocate Bart Mindszenthy, and co-author of the bestselling book, Parenting Your Parents.

1. How can Caregivers combat depression?

Two core ways. One: stay active and engaged with everyday life and activity to offer mental release and relief. Two: Actually understand the challenges at hand and the inevitable limitations and outcomes. Finding the right balance is the key, and being realistic about what one wants to do versus what one actually can do.

2. How can Caregivers effectively network?

Supportive websites like www.mycarejourney.com are available. Get involved with active Family Councils at assisted living residences and nursing homes. Links are offered by various support organizations such as the Alzheimer’s Society, Parkinson’s Society, and other not-for-profits. Building networks at houses of worship and other social and fraternal organizations is significant.

3. How Caregivers can ease the inevitable loss in work, pay, and social security?

There is no easy way but one might be able to marginalize. There are myriad stories of caregivers losing job advancements and earning power. The best way to marginalize is to plan ahead to understand needs and find appropriate jobs, or negotiate early on with one’s boss.

4. How Caregivers need to plan for their loved one’s death through proper legal planning.

Have clear expectations in place about ceremonies and services, cremation or burial options, memorial wording, estate disposition and any other wishes. Discuss end of life directions: DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate), wills, living wills and powers of attorney (general and health). Thought and action is needed for this phase while aging loved ones are competent to express their desires.

5. How can Caregivers – aka – the sandwiched generation deal with its dual role?

The best way is to separate roles and goals. The key is to have late teens or early adults understand their role in eldercare, and how to deliver on it. Set out realistic demands and resources. This approach is better than effecting change with aging parents who can be headstrong due to medical conditions and entrenched expectations.

Have you checked to see what your parents are eating at each meal? Are they having three sound meals a day? Are they getting the right mix for what they need? Is the food fresh? Who cooks, how often?

There are lots of considerations and it would be a good thing to examine what your parents eat, how, how often, and what that does for them. Too often the elderly slide into poor eating habits that will actually harm their health.

Take a look, make an inventory, get advice from their family physician if you can or a licensed nutritionist at the least. Have you checked? Care to share with us?

The fact is that right now more than half a million Canadians are suffering from some form of dementia. That number will be in excess of a million within just twenty years.

While we can’t stop or reverse the onset of dementia, we can do a lot to better watch for the signs, learn strategies for managing it in our loved ones, and as a family determining how we’re doing to deal with it.

Early warning signs include obvious sort-term memory loss, poor longer-term memory retention, clear examples of disorientation, confusion and getting lost or wondering, and substantial repetitive behaviour. For the sake of all, we need to watch for the signs, not deny or ignore them!

Are you being proactive about watching for signs of dementia? Have any stories or examples to share with us?

Three hours later at four in the morning, my friend’s phone rang. It was the hospital. His father-in-law had vanished. No sight or sound of him. Lost. Not anywhere in the hospital or on the grounds. A search was launched. The 85-year old was found on a downtown street just before dawn in a hospital gown and his shoes, shuffling along and as amiable but confused as ever.

All ended well enough, but the lesson was blaring and profound: where were the safeguards, within the hospital, and attached to the patient? Aside from questions about access and egress safety precautions at all doors, more importantly is the question: if a patient is a known wanderer, why wasn’t a door alarm activating or tracking bracelet put on his wrist or leg?

Read More

That’s often one of the consequences of caring for an aging parent or other older loved one. Lots of conflicts are happening: spousal wishes, work demands, grown kids who still need your attention, social time… and, focusing on those aging people who mean so much to you.

To help everyone and most importantly, to help yourself, pause periodically for a personal cause. Take a break. Hide for half a day. Skip out for a day. Go see a mindless movie, go fishing or skating or whatever gives you pleasure.

You can’t be at your best when you are run down, either mentally or physically, or, worse, both. Do you give yourself permission to pause for an important personal cause: your own wellbeing? Think about. And do it!

My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.

He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
“Oh, baloney!” she said. “He hit a horse.”

“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman, would take the streetcar to work and my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.

It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother.

So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.

(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.

If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”

“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre..

“No left turns,” he said.

“What?” I asked

“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic..

As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”

“What?” I said again.

“No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support.

“No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”
But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.

“Loses count?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”

I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.

“No,” he said ” If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.

She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.

They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.

“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: “I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet”

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life, Or because he quit taking left turns.

Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you right. Forget about the ones who don’t. Believe everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it and if it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.

“The problem of nurses with back injuries is huge―it’s an epidemic,” says Tilak Dutta, a Toronto Rehab research associate, Technology Team member and PhD candidate.

Back injury is the most common complaint among nurses and 80 per cent of these injuries occur during the transfer, lifting or repositioning of a patient. A 2005 Statistics Canada study found that in the previous year, 37 per cent of nurses had experienced pain serious enough to prevent them from carrying out their normal daily activities, and one in 10 nurses reported severe or unbearable pain.

Dutta is determined to make things better for nurses. He hopes his research will help them avoid back injuries that can be costly, both in terms of quality of life and economically.

“The question is, despite the availability of mechanical patient lifts over the past 25 years or so, why do we continue to see such high levels of back injuries among nurses?”

One reason is that due to time pressure, some nurses may not be using the overhead or floor lifts. Obesity is another factor: in Canada, there has been a 225 per cent increase in obesity since 1985 and the prevalence of obesity among new nursing home admissions has increased from 15 to 25 per cent over a 10-year period. “People are bigger now―not only the patients but the caregivers too, which means they’ve got more load on their spines to start with.”

Another complication is that pushing, pulling and turning a floor lift, and getting a sling under a patient in order to lift the person, causes caregiver back stress that can lead to injury. In a series of studies on sling insertion, and on the use of overhead versus floor lifts, Dutta found that “an overhead lift resulted in much lower back load for the caregiver, whether the person was working alone or with a second caregiver.”

Dutta is now analyzing data from a study comparing a Toronto Rehab invention called SlingSerter™―a novel pneumatic sling insertion device―to the conventional method of rolling a patient to tuck a sling under them for lifting purposes (see Rehab innovations on page X).

Older nurses are at greater risk for back injury than younger nurses, yet Dutta has discovered that more experienced nurses have lower levels of back loading “because they have learned tips and tricks to reduce the amount they are bending, and their movements are more fluid and efficient compared to younger nurses and nursing students.”

He is also working on an intriguing project to determine if height can be measured precisely enough to be used as a tool for monitoring cumulative back loading in caregivers, and then adjusting their routines to avoid injury.

“The spine actually shrinks over the course of a day based on the amount of load it is under,” Dutta explains. Experts now agree that cumulative load over the course of the day is a greater risk factor for injury than a single lifting activity.

“If we can find a way to measure cumulative load and prevent shrinking a little, it’s a good indication that the caregiver will be at less risk of injury too.”

Adds Dutta’s PhD supervisor, Toronto Rehab senior scientist Dr. Geoff Fernie: “Getting sound evidence on best practice to avoid back injuries when lifting patients is very important. That’s where Tilak’s research is starting to make a real impact.”