The Parent Care Conversation: Six Strategies for Dealing with the Emotional and Financial Challenges of Agingparents

As a financial planner, boomers increasingly were asking for help with their elderly parents. I buy Dan Taylor's book by the case and give them to clients as part of the planning process. Not only is the book invaluable to boomers, it is useful when planning for WOOFs (well off older folks)to help them frame ideas to give their grown children clarity as to their wishes. Lewis J. Walker, CFP, CIMC, CRC, PCS

In clear prose, Dan Taylor guides you through how to talk to your elderly parents and help plan for their future to maximize indpendent living. I took voluminous notes and rank it as the best book of its type and I have read at least 20 others.

As a pastor, I am always searching for resources that will stimulate conversations between generations, particularly in dealing with end of life issues. Taylor's book is an excellent tool for adult children to begin needed talks with aging parents. Plus it works in the opposite direction--a tool for aging parents to express their own concerns as they face the many unknowns of their future.

With parents in nursing homes and problems that go with it, my husband and I bought this book, and plan to pass it around to all our children to read. The more we know at middle age, the better off we and our children will be later on.

We hear so much about caring for aging parents these days that at times it feels that children are in a no win situation. Care-giving involves making difficult decisions which should be handled with as much thought and discussion as possible. Thanks to Daniel Taylor, a 20 year veteran of the financial services industry, an attorney, and president of his own North Carolina-based advisory firm, for showing us an intelligent way in dealing with the emotional, practical, and financial challenges of caring for aging parents. Taylor has put together an excellent guide book, The Parent Care Conversation: Six Strategies for Transforming the Emotional and Financial Future of Your Aging Parents where he presents a system that he developed that grew out of his own experiences in dealing with his father's care. It is a system he has structured around the acronym CARE which stands for the following: challenges, alternatives, resources, and experience. This system will aid children in opening up the doors of communication with their parents on key issues relating to their future care-even those which they were reluctant to discuss. According to Taylor, the CARE "hear and now" listening system focuses on the knack of asking the right questions now in order to avoid confusion and conflict in the future from chaotic decision making. Taylor applies his system to six conversations that children should have with their aging parents: the big picture conversation pertaining to your parent's vision of their future: the money conversation where you wish to obtain an overall grasp of your parents' current and future financial needs: the property conversation which focuses on your parents moveable possessions and how they would want them to be distributed: the house conversation dealing with your parents plans to either stay in their home or move somewhere else: the professional care conversation and the kind of care they would want: the legacy conversation that will get parents thinking about their lives, achievements and the legacy they wish to leave. No doubt, all of these issues are at times somewhat daunting, and as Taylor states: "talking to the elderly about aging is a lot like talking to the poor about poverty; no matter how delicately we approach the subject, we run the risk of scaring, offending, or outright alienating them merely by bringing it up." Consequently, initiating the parent care conversations is not a matter in deciding when these conversations should take place but how they should be held. Throughout the book, Taylor emphasizes that you must avoid the pitfall of coming across as intrusive where you bulldoze your feelings and opinions onto your parents. This approach is guaranteed to turn them off and probably shut them down completely. Instead, Taylor presents the parent care conversations in a way that is designed to open up the doors of communication between parents and children in order to arrive at a clear, mutual understanding of eac