Obligated to Care For Abusive Aging Parents?

From Reddit posts to questions sent in to The Ethicist on the New York Times… I’ve seen a few posts seeking advice about how best to handle aging parents that you don’t like. Often there can be the assumption that children will take care of their elderly parents since the parents once took care of them.

But what if the parents did a poor job? What if they were abusive or neglectful? Do the children still owe their parents that reciprocity? And what about the notion of obligation at all? Parents chose to have children and to raise them. Are adult children allowed to choose what to do? Or, just by virtue of their birth, are they required to care for their parents when they’re elderly?

For me, obligation is a four letter word. I value honesty and integrity in words and in actions. And doing things we really don’t want to do are then a betrayal of our own integrity because it means we’re not being true to ourselves. And since we only have this one life to live, shouldn’t we figure out we want to live it?

Instead of really taking the time to figure that out, we can fall into the habit of doing what others around us say we should or should not be doing.

And when it comes to online advice, of course the different should’s runs the gamut. Some advocate for shunning and essentially disowning parents, some say to help out but only to do the bare minimum, whereas others think active caregiving duties are appropriate.

But no one has the authority to tell another adult what they should or should not do. Each adult has free-will and therefore has the ability to make choices for themselves. And if we want to help people to make decisions, the healthy way to do that is to empower people to decide for themselves.

We do this by being more inquisitive than over-bearing. We empower people by helping them to understand their own needs and priorities. We help people make decisions not by telling them what to do, but by helping them to think through their values and capabilities and the results of different choices. Plus we can help people to brainstorm alternate ideas if needed.

Many people give advice based on what they imagine they would do. But simply because a certain decision would work for them, doesn’t mean it’s the right decision, or the best decision for others.

We all have this one individual life we’re living. And the whole point of being alive is to live - to make choices and to have experiences. So why not have the experiences we actually want to have? Why not live by our own inner compass?

Some may say that if we just do what we want all the time, that will make us selfish people. But here’s the thing, I’m not afraid of the word selfish. Personally I prefer the term self-centered though.

And I think it’s important to be self-centered. It’s vital to keep our needs central when making decisions for our own lives. But here’s the part most people forget. Just because we make our own needs central in our lives, doesn’t mean we can’t also care about the needs of others.

I call this being positively self-centered. We can be self-centered while still valuing the needs of others at the same time. We can help our partners while still being mindful of our own bandwidth. We can accept new projects at work while still carving out vacation time with the family. Caring about ourselves and caring about others are not mutually exclusive. We can do both - and in so doing, we can prioritize our needs as our default setting and use that as the framwork for determining how much more we have to give others.

So let’s get back to the question of aging parents who were abusive. But this time let’s imagine that the adult child is positively self-centered.

If a positively self-centered person was asking or being asked about this dilemma, I’d expect a number of questions for the adult child.

Firstly, what does the child even want to do with respect to the ailing parents? What would make them feel best? Is the child comfortable walking away? Is the child comfortable with caretaking duties? Is there a range of what they might want to do, i.e. can come by once a week to help but would not be willing to live together. And aside from potential caretaking, do they want any relationship with the parents at all?

And what about other ideas? Aside from just caretaking or not- what about hiring someone else to help with the responsibilities? Is that an option? What about senior centers?

There are so many questions that can be asked and conversations to be had which could help a person make this type of important decision. And as always, the best advice isn’t really advice at all. It’s questions and pointers that empower others to make the best decisions possible for themselves.