Our Long-Distance Sister Questions How We Care for Aging Parents

To prevent this, your sister needs a way to contribute to the caregiving that meets several requirements. She works with you as a trusted collaborator, not a fearsome critic. She is truly helpful to you and your parents. She feels gratified by the positive difference she is making. A series of frank discussions may help create those conditions and eliminate her urge for any future “swooping.” Here are ideas for how to start that conversation:

Gather the team

You and your sisters, like all sibling groups, are a caregiving team composed of members with different opinions, personalities and talents. As with any sports or work project team, the more the members communicate with one another, hash out disagreements and coordinate their efforts, the more likely that the caregiving team will be greater than the sum of its individual participants.

Teams need meetings to work all this out. Schedule a formal family meeting on a specific day and time (during one of her visits or via video) with the stated purpose of reassessing your parents’ needs and the effectiveness of the current caregiving plan for supporting them. If your parents are cognitively capable of participating, then it might be a good idea to invite them as well so they can provide their input and, hopefully, bless the resulting plan.

The ideal caregiver team meeting

Ideally, this meeting and subsequent ones will achieve four goals:

• Develop a consensus among all siblings about the parents’ needs. For example, can you and your sisters reach a general agreement about how much help your parents need with their activities of daily living, such as bathing, grooming and dressing? Are you aligned on whether they should or shouldn’t be driving or managing their finances on their own? Are you on the same page about their choices of doctors or where they reside?
• Jointly create a caregiving plan in which each sibling has an assigned role they are committed to. For a long-distance caregiver, that role should include tasks they can do by phone or online, such as scheduling appointments, paying bills or calling insurance companies. They should also visit the parents when possible to provide respite for frontline caregivers.
• What you cocreate should be a working plan to be reviewed and updated at least every three months as the parents’ needs and siblings’ availability change.
• Instill a spirit of teamwork by frequently reminding everyone of the shared mission — enabling parents to age with safety and dignity. Such camaraderie strengthens family bonds among siblings during caregiving and long afterwards.

Corralling the critic

More from Barry Jacobs

I’m a Sole Family Caregiver. What Will My Husband Do If Something Bad Happens to Me?
My Husband With Dementia Yells at Me. I’m Tired of It
My Family Can’t Agree About End-of-Life Decisions for My Parent. Everyone Is Angry
I Can’t Talk to My Ill Spouse Anymore. How Can I Still Find Emotional Support?
My Dad’s Health Crises Are Wreaking Havoc on My Life. I’m in Mourning

But we all know that what’s ideal doesn’t always occur during caregiving team meetings or visits, especially if you have a sister who may offend by questioning your caregiving judgment. There are three tactics to try, which may encourage her to shift away from her presumptuous, critical tone:

• Don’t try to avoid her or minimize her involvement in the caregiving. Instead, praise her for caring enough to make the effort to improve the team’s plan — even if her insinuating questions make you uncomfortable. Say something like, “Thank you for bringing that up; we hadn’t thought about that. There are other things for us to consider, but we should take your idea into account too.” Why? Feeling heard and valued, she will then be more likely to listen to you and your nearby sister, too.
• Don’t brush off her questions by saying, “We are already taking care of that” or “You don’t quite understand what’s going on.” Instead, respond by saying, “Glad you brought that up. There is a lot of information about it that we can share with you.” She will either welcome that offer of information as an invitation to get more involved in the caregiving, or she may think to herself, “This is more than I have the time to deal with,” and then back off. In the former case, she will feel valued once again and may take a softer approach with you. In the latter, you will have succeeded in getting her to stop interrogating you.
• If she needs a sense of authority over your parents’ care, give her specific tasks to assume full charge of. Let her be the family spokesperson and advocate for your parents on all insurance matters. Have her deal with medical equipment companies and meal delivery services. If she has her own caregiving domain, then she may be less likely to question how you manage yours.

Bird’s-eye view

There is one more tactic that may help: Don’t react to your out-of-town sister as a swooping hawk but instead as, say, a noisy crow who is always on the lookout for danger. With her longer, most distant view of your parents, she may see subtle signs of their slow decline from one three-time-a-year visit to the next, which you and your nearby sister may be too close to them to notice. She could then helpfully add her perspective to your team discussion so that, together, you can support them as caring siblings the best that you can.