Decision Points in Parenting

Throughout our lives, we’ll encounter different types of parenting that mark eras. 

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• Our parents caring for us
• Caring for our children
• Involvement with our grandchildren
• Overseeing our parents’ care or needs
• Caring for other family members, of various ages,  who have become our responsibility.

Throughout all of these eras will come various decisions.  We will make them as a child or an adult.  We will come to points where it’s difficult to know what to do, but we must choose a path after acquiring information and knowledge.

One of the more difficult decisions many of us have to make is whether and when to place a parent in an assisted living or nursing home, depending on their level of care.  Perhaps other family members don’t understand and resist.  Perhaps the parent doesn’t understand either.

This becomes one where you must consider many factors, the pros and cons, the possibilities and the impossibilities, the practical and the impossible.

It’s a decision point I had to reach with my mother.  When I placed her in a nursing home, due to her Alzheimer’s and needing more care than I could give her, I discovered that much of my agonizing was for naught.  Mother thought she’d gone back to her old home and was with her sister.  When I visited, she never expected to leave with me. 

 Fortunately for me she adapted to this world of her creation and expected me to enter it with her.  I learned to enjoy it, too, and was thankful I could give her pleasure in this reverse role of parenting.

What have been some of your decision points of parenting?