Custody Battles and the Elderly: A Growing Trend

Custody battles involving adult children fighting over their elderly parents and where they should live, who should care for them and who should control their finances is a growing trend. As this trend increases, we encourage families to find a mediator to resolve a dispute or provide options for the future.

Caring for an aging parent can be complicated. Adult children may find themselves managing a parent’s health, personal and financial affairs. Concerned children and frustrated parents may end up arguing over the next step, and siblings may find themselves laboriously assigning new tasks and responsibilities in an effort to create a safe environment for a parent.

Some family members find it hard to communicate with each other when their parent is in need of care. Perhaps they were not raised to work out problems together so that as adults they don’t have a family council strategy to rely on. Such a process may seem unnatural to them. But that is often exactly what is needed, especially in situations in which one child is caring for the parents and the others are left out of the loop.

Children all have a common bond to their parents and as a result a common obligation to each other. When disagreements arise, suspicions begin to grow. Suspicions or distrust often leads to anger which in turns causes people to sever the channels of communication between them. This can occur between parent and child, between siblings or between all of them.

Other than the parent’s lawyer or accountant, most families would not consider inviting a third party into the discussion. Elder mediators a private, beneficial option for families in need of neutral guidance. The goal of elder mediation is to allow seniors a voice in the decision-making process and to help families communicate with compassionate candor about situations which need to be addressed.

Elder mediation is especially effective at the beginning of the decision process – when families are fact finding, struggling with options and discovering feelings about their parents or adult children that escalate and make clear thinking difficult. For instance, an important form of elder mediation is simply to convene a family meeting where a trained neutral third party is present to create the space for everyone in the family to be heard on an important developing family transition. This type of meeting, before the family is in crisis, can strengthen family ties and enable all family members to deal with the changing nature of their relationships and the realities of their situation. It allows family dynamics including sibling rivalries to be addressed at a time when everyone is calm and thoughtful decision making can occur.