Forever Young Magazine

November 2006
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Section: Being Well

Decision Making
By Toby Laping, Ph. D., C.S.W.,
Private Care Manager

Toby Laping
Ph. D., C.S.W.,
Private Care Manager

It’s normal for loving children to want their parents to be as safe and comfortable as possible. Often, though, children and parents have different priorities. Comfort is the parents’ focus; safety is the motivation for many children.

When seniors are mentally competent and fully aware of the risks involved in their lifestyle choices, it’s reasonable to make sure those risks don’t put others at physical risk. Driving, for example, is one area in which an assessment of skills can protect the public as well as the individual. With many other decisions, however, it is unacceptable when the reasonable choices that seniors make are not respected. Changes are too often imposed to calm the concerns of children, regardless of the resistance of the older person or whether the change adds to quality of life. We often see competent seniors who have been pushed and nagged into accepting help or a move that was neither wanted nor essential. Making a decision different from the wishes of children is not sufficient reason to claim that the senior lacks capacity.

Cognitive capacity must play a significant role in deciding the appropriate degree of intervention. But it’s troublesome when those safety net services are forced on parents whose judgments and decision-making capacities are very much intact. Adult children often feel guilty and forced into unnecessary, intrusive actions when well-meaning neighbors or friends challenge their apparent inaction, which looks like lack of concern, even calling those children neglectful. The appropriate response to those neighbors is that the competent parent has a right to live as she’s living. Each of us wants no less for ourselves and our parents are entitled to the same consideration.

As a culture, we tend to treat all older people as though their choices are naïve and their judgment is impaired, and we often refuse seniors the right to take the same chances we would take for ourselves. Age alone is not a justification for taking away decision making about lifestyle. Children often need to back off and live with the knowledge that mentally competent parents have weighed options and decided how they want to live.

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