Love, Limits and Aging Parents

What happens when staying connected to an aging parent is destroying your emotional well-being? In this episode, Esther Kane and licensed professional counselor Laurie Newcomb discuss one of the most painful decisions...

Most caregivers never make a safety plan — because making one feels like an accusation. Like you're saying something out loud about your parent, or your family, that you're not ready to say. So instead you improvise...

You walk into your parent’s home carrying nothing — and walk out hours later carrying all of it. Their fear. Their anger. Their despair. You take it home, and it becomes your evening, your sleep, your Monday. In this...

Everyone tells you to “just set a boundary.” As if it were simple. As if the person on the other side weren’t your aging parent — the one who needs you, who raised you, who can make you feel like a bad daughter with a...

Somewhere in you, quietly, there’s a hope you may never say out loud: that this time — with age, with illness, with time running short — your parent will finally soften. Finally see you. Finally become the person you...

Some of us learned early that love had to be earned — by being helpful, agreeable, undemanding. The child who never made waves. The one everyone could count on. Now that same child is grown, doing most of the...

You show up for your parent every single day — patient, steady, endlessly kind. So why is the one person you’re hardest on always yourself? In this episode, Esther and Laurie sit with the quiet cruelty caregivers turn...

Caregiving can bring up more than exhaustion, worry, and responsibility. It can also uncover a quieter kind of grief: the pain of realizing you never had the parent, or the relationship, you needed. In this episode of...

Even as grown adults, many of us still long to hear our parents say, “I’m proud of you.” And when that approval has always felt conditional, or never came at all, caregiving can reopen wounds we thought we had outgrown...

You love your parent. You're also exhausted by them. Resentful of them. Maybe relieved when you walk out the door — and then immediately ashamed of that relief. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Esther...

You love them. You also dread their phone calls. You feel responsible for their happiness — and somehow guilty about your own. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Esther and Laurie unpack one of the most...

This is where it all begins. In this foundational episode, Esther Kane and Laurie Newcomb go back to the very reason this show exists — because millions of adult children are carrying something enormous in almost...

If you love your parent and they've also hurt you, you already know how impossible that feels to explain. In this episode, Esther Kane and Laurie Newcomb explore the emotional complexity that makes caregiving for an...

Abuse in caregiving relationships is rarely what people expect — and it's almost never talked about openly. In this episode, Esther Kane (retired OT and Certified Aging in Place Specialist) and Laurie Newcomb (licensed...

<p>You spent years — maybe decades — building distance from what happened in that house. And now you're back in the thick of it, not because you wanted to be, but because someone has to help. Caregiving has a way of...