You're Not Becoming Your Parents' Parent

It often starts with something that is easy to explain away. Your mother calls because she cannot figure out a bill she has paid for years. Your father gets another dent in the car and isn't quite sure where it came from. An appointment gets missed. There is expired food in the refrigerator. Maybe you find out your parent gave personal information to someone who called claiming to be from the government.

Any one of those things can happen without signaling a larger problem. People forget appointments, get into accidents, fall behind on household chores and get fooled by convincing scams. When several things begin happening, though, adult children understandably start paying closer attention.

Before long, you may be asking questions you never used to ask. Did you take your medication? When is your next appointment? Did you pay the insurance bill? Who was that person who called you? You may start attending medical appointments or checking whether something your parent tells you sounds right.

People sometimes describe this stage of life as becoming the parent to your parent. The phrase makes sense because responsibility is changing, but I think it can also lead families in the wrong direction. Your parent may need considerably more help than before. They are still an adult, and needing help does not automatically mean losing the right to make decisions.

The question for many families isn't simply whether Mom or Dad needs help. It is what to do when you are worried about someone's safety and that person still has opinions, preferences and authority over their own life.

When you're worried and your parent disagrees

A parent can make a choice their adult children dislike without lacking the ability to make that choice. There is a meaningful difference between thinking, "Dad should not do this," and concluding that Dad can no longer make this decision for himself.

Most families encounter that uncertainty long before a formal capacity evaluation or legal proceeding is involved. They're trying to make sense of changes they're seeing, decide how seriously to take them and figure out whether someone outside the family needs to become involved.

Driving is one of the clearest examples.

The driving conversation

There is no age at which someone automatically becomes an unsafe driver. The National Institute on Aging recommends looking at driving ability rather than age alone. Vision, hearing, physical changes, medications, medical conditions, reaction time and cognition can all matter, and a professional driving evaluation may be useful when there are concerns (National Institute on Aging).

An 82-year-old who is driving safely should not lose that independence simply because 82 sounds old. Repeated crashes, getting lost on familiar roads, serious traffic mistakes or medical problems that interfere with driving are different and deserve attention.

For the person being asked to stop, the conversation may involve much more than the car. Driving can determine whether someone can buy groceries, attend church, see friends, make appointments and leave home without arranging transportation. An adult child may be focused on the possibility of a crash while the parent is thinking about what daily life will look like if the car is gone.

A professional assessment can sometimes be more useful than another family argument because it focuses the conversation on the person's actual ability to drive safely.

Helping can become a substantial job

Many people do not make a deliberate decision to become caregivers. Their responsibilities accumulate.

You take your mother to an appointment because you're available, then start going to the important ones because she has trouble remembering what was discussed. There is a prescription to refill, an insurance company to call and something at the house that needs attention. Eventually you realize you are also keeping track of groceries, transportation or medications.

No single task necessarily takes much time, but together they can become a substantial part of someone's week.

The 2025 Caregiving in the U.S. report from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimates that approximately 63 million Americans provide ongoing care to an adult or child with a complex medical condition or disability. More than 40% provide what the report classifies as high-intensity care, and nearly half reported at least one negative financial impact associated with caregiving (AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, 2025).

Those figures cover a broad caregiving population and should not be treated as a prediction of what caring for an aging parent will do to a particular family. They do help put the workload in perspective.

Adult children may be taking this on while they are still working, raising children, maintaining relationships, dealing with their own health and trying to prepare financially for their own later years. A doctor's appointment on Tuesday afternoon does not replace any of those responsibilities. It gets added to them.

Mixed feelings about caregiving

People do not always feel one way about caring for a parent. Someone may love their mother and still dread seeing her name on the phone after a difficult week. They may be worried about their father while also angry that he refuses help, or resent a sibling who rarely makes it to appointments.

Researchers use the term intergenerational ambivalence to describe the coexistence of positive and negative feelings within relationships between adult children and aging parents. Willson, Shuey and Elder examined 1,599 parent, adult-child and in-law relationships and found greater ambivalence under several circumstances, including among adult children who reported poorer relationships with their parents earlier in life (Willson, Shuey, & Elder, 2003). The study does not establish that earlier relationship problems cause later caregiver distress, but it does reinforce the importance of the history between the people involved.

A review of 19 qualitative studies on adult children caring for aging parents also identified the quality of the parent-child relationship as an important part of how caregiving was experienced (Luichies, Goossensen, & van der Meide, 2021). Because these were qualitative studies, they are better understood as describing recurring experiences than measuring how common those experiences are.

People sometimes judge themselves harshly for having complicated feelings about caregiving, especially when they believe they're supposed to feel only concern or gratitude. Caregiving doesn't wipe out the relationship that existed before a parent needed help.

The relationship you had before still matters

A lot of caregiving advice seems to begin with an unstated assumption that the parent and adult child had a close, supportive relationship before anything changed.

That isn't true in every family.

Some people are caring for a parent who spent decades caring for them, and they experience this responsibility partly as reciprocity. Others are helping a parent with whom they have always had a difficult relationship. There may have been years of conflict or emotional distance. Some families have histories involving addiction, neglect, abuse or estrangement.

A parent's illness does not answer the questions created by that history. Someone can find themselves coordinating a cardiology appointment for a father they barely spoke to five years ago or trying to decide how involved to become with a mother from whom they intentionally created distance.

Research can tell us that prior relationship quality is relevant to the experience of caregiving. It cannot tell an individual adult child what they owe a parent. Family expectations, culture, finances, practical necessity, personal values and the history between the two people can all be part of that decision.

For some people, this is the hardest part of caregiving.

When siblings disagree about what is happening

Siblings bring additional people, information and opinions into decisions about what a parent needs and who should be responsible for providing it.

One sibling may handle appointments because they live nearby. Another may manage finances from another state. Someone may contribute money but have little time available. There may also be a sibling who thinks everyone else is overreacting.

Family conflict over caregiving is not a new observation. In a study of 100 adult-child caregivers, Strawbridge and Wallhagen found that disagreements with family members often involved relatives not providing enough assistance (Strawbridge & Wallhagen, 1991). It is a small, older study and should not be used to estimate how often today's families experience caregiver conflict, but the kind of disagreement it identified remains recognizable.

The disagreement isn't always about who cares more. Family members may have different information. The child who is nearby may see missed medications and repeated problems at home that other siblings rarely witness. Carrying most of the responsibility can also affect how someone interprets another new problem.

It helps to separate observations from conclusions. "Mom missed two appointments this month and paid the electric bill twice" gives a family something concrete to discuss. "Mom can't live by herself anymore" is already a conclusion about what those events mean.

Families may still disagree, but at least they are disagreeing about the same information.

When money makes you wonder if something has changed

Finding out that a parent gave money or personal information to a scammer can be frightening, particularly when it is completely out of character.

Older adults are targeted by government impersonation scams, technology scams and other forms of fraud. Financial exploitation can also involve people the older adult knows, including relatives, friends or caregivers. The National Institute on Aging notes that financial exploitation includes misuse of an older adult's money or property through methods such as deception, intimidation or unauthorized use (National Institute on Aging).

Being fooled by a scam is not evidence by itself that someone has dementia.

An NIA-funded study published in JAMA Network Open tested responses to a simulated government impersonation scam among 644 older adults. Some participants provided personal information even though they did not have dementia. Cognitive performance, financial literacy and scam awareness differed across some response groups, but the study also showed why a family's interpretation needs to be cautious: vulnerability to a convincing scam and cognitive impairment are not interchangeable concepts (Yu et al., 2023).

What happens next depends on the situation. A fraudulent transaction may require immediate contact with a bank or credit-card company and reporting to appropriate authorities. Suspected exploitation by a relative or caregiver raises different concerns and may warrant involvement from Adult Protective Services or other agencies. If financial problems appear alongside broader changes in memory, reasoning or everyday functioning, medical evaluation may also be appropriate.

A scam can be a reason to pay closer attention, particularly if other changes have been occurring. By itself, though, it cannot tell a family whether cognitive impairment is present.

When the question really is capacity

There are situations where families have reason to question whether a parent can continue making a particular kind of decision independently. That is different from simply disagreeing with them.

Decision-making capacity is generally considered in relation to a particular decision or function rather than as an all-or-nothing judgment about a person. Someone may have difficulty managing complicated finances, for example, without necessarily being unable to participate meaningfully in medical decisions or make ordinary choices about daily life (Moye & Marson, 2007).

Assessing capacity can involve medical, cognitive, functional and environmental information, depending on what is being evaluated. A 2022 scoping review of decision-making capacity related to independent living found that assessment commonly involved multiple components and supported a multidisciplinary approach (Usher & Stapleton, 2022).

Who becomes involved depends on the concern. A physician may evaluate whether an illness, medication effect or acute change is affecting cognition. Neuropsychological assessment may be part of a broader evaluation when cognitive abilities need closer examination. Occupational therapists and driving rehabilitation specialists can address functional or driving concerns. Legal questions involving powers of attorney, guardianship or authority over finances belong with qualified attorneys and the courts. Families dealing with those questions may need an attorney rather than trying to settle them through a family vote.

Mental health treatment has a different role. Therapy may be useful for the adult child or family dealing with anxiety, guilt, anger, grief, relationship conflict and the emotional consequences of a parent's changing needs. It is not a substitute for an evaluation of driving ability, cognitive functioning, legal authority or financial capacity.

When the strain is affecting you

There is no psychiatric diagnosis for finding caregiving difficult. Being frustrated after spending an afternoon fighting with an insurance company is not evidence of an anxiety disorder, and feeling resentful about another canceled weekend does not mean someone is clinically depressed.

There is also a point where distress deserves attention in its own right. If sleep, mood, anxiety or the ability to function day to day has changed substantially and isn't improving, it may be worth talking with a mental health professional rather than assuming it's simply something a caregiver has to endure.

The National Institute on Aging recognizes stress, loneliness, sadness, frustration and exhaustion among difficulties caregivers may experience and recommends seeking additional support when caregiving demands become difficult to manage (National Institute on Aging).

The help someone needs may be practical rather than psychological: transportation, respite care, home-health services, adult-day programs, help from relatives or a different division of responsibilities. Therapy cannot manufacture more hours in the week or make an unwilling sibling participate.

Therapy can help someone decide what they can realistically take on, address guilt or anger that is interfering with decisions, work through old family issues that caregiving has brought back to the surface, and recognize when their own mental health needs attention.

Helping without taking over

You may eventually be driving your mother to every appointment, managing medications, helping with bills or participating in decisions you never expected to be making with a parent.

Some families eventually need formal evaluations, additional care, legal planning or changes in living arrangements. In other families, a parent may need increasing amounts of help for years while remaining capable of making many or most decisions independently.

There is rarely a way to eliminate all risk in that situation. A parent may want more independence than their children are comfortable with, while the adult children may want guarantees about safety that nobody can provide.

Families may have to live with some of that uncertainty while responding to the problems they can actually identify and bringing in the appropriate professionals when an evaluation is needed. Providing more care can change a parent-child relationship considerably. It does not give an adult child control over the parent's life.

At Coalesce Family Services, we work with adults and families dealing with anxiety, caregiving strain, grief, family conflict and major changes in relationships. Counseling can help when caring for an aging parent begins affecting your mental health, your relationships or your ability to make decisions without being overwhelmed by guilt, anger or fear.