Are our parents getting more stubborn as they age?

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When you are getting on in years yourself, it’s not easy to deal with your parents who behave like kids.

 

SINGAPORE - The other day, a friend expressed dread about taking her mother on a holiday.

 

You might think her unfilial. Far from it.

 

Her mother has been living with knee problems for years, making it hard for her to walk, but refuses to use any walking aids.

 

Even on well-trodden paths, she is often in danger of falling, and my friend worried about being on unfamiliar terrain.

 

But they went ahead in the end, and all was well, except perhaps my friend’s blood pressure stayed high until the holiday was over.

 

In another episode that underscores how difficult interactions between ageing parents and their adult children can be, a close friend had a run-in with her mother who wanted to be discharged from hospital against doctors’ orders.

 

The older woman’s blood pressure reading had gone up to the dangerously high level of 200/100 and had not gone down even after she was admitted, but she insisted she was feeling fine and wanted to be discharged.

 

My friend told us she was so exasperated that she mockingly threatened to wield the cane.

 

Acting like children

 

These struggles with managing “wayward” parents are not unique. As my friends and I enter our 40s and 50s and our parents get on in years, I have begun to hear more and more complaints about parents being “intransigent”, “naughty” and otherwise acting like children.

 

In my own family, there is a running joke about my dad’s stubborn insistence on parking the car in the same parking space every night.

 

Since it is not reserved just for him, this means he sometimes ends up waiting a long time for it to become available, often, even at the expense of family dinner. Our attempts to persuade him otherwise have fallen on deaf ears.

 

This phenomenon of “stubborn parents” is quite widespread, it would seem, according to an exploratory study conducted by gerontologist Allison Heid in 2016. She and her colleagues polled 189 adult children, aged 45 to 65, about how often they encountered insistent, resistant or persistent behaviour from their parents, aged 63 to 95.

 

What the researchers found: 77 per cent of the children reported such stubborn behaviour by their parents at least sometimes and, interestingly, 66 per cent of parents, too, described themselves as stubborn.

 

Several factors lead to this dynamic between children and their parents.

 

Mr Philip Chan, a senior counsellor at Care Corner Seniors Services’ Gerontological Counselling Unit, told me sometimes our parents are just insisting on going about their day the way they have always done. But children may perceive this as stubborn because we have assessed that they need to change their habits or routine as they get older and more frail.

 

Indeed, Dr Heid’s research found that the perception of stubbornness goes up when a parent’s level of disability increases. Conflicts can arise when both sides disagree on how serious a situation is.

 

For example, Mr Chan had counselled an elderly woman who was furious that her son hired a helper for her after she suffered a fall and refused to go for physiotherapy. While the son had done this with good intentions, believing that it was safer for her to stop doing the daily household chores, she saw it as a waste of money as she believed she could continue cooking and cleaning.

 

In Asian culture, there is also a deeply ingrained belief that parents are always right, and this makes it harder for ageing parents to defer to their children – even if the children are adults and may be even young seniors themselves.

 

“They may think: I am the father, how can my children be telling me what to do,” said Mr Chan.

 

A coping mechanism

 

In fact, this stubbornness is often a coping mechanism for the elderly.

 

Ageing strips away some level of control over their lives, and to cope, parents might cling to familiar routines or decisions as a way of sustaining a sense of autonomy and identity.

 

That is also why accepting help and advice even – or especially – from their children can feel like a threat to their self-worth.

 

The woman whose son hired her a helper had complained angrily to Mr Chan that she saw no purpose in being around if she was of “no more use” at home.

 

Underlying her unhappiness was, in fact, her inability to deal with the loss of her identity.

 

Often, people think of loss as the death of a loved one but, in the process of ageing, one can also find it hard to deal with the loss of mobility, social life and identity, said Mr Chan.

 

Adult children may believe they are struggling with increasingly stubborn parents, but their parents may actually be dealing with deeper issues.

 

Many of us still see our parents as invincible figures who, for the longest time, could take care of just about anything.

 

It can be discombobulating to see them facing challenges of their own as they age.

 

The role reversal that comes with having to care for them in some cases can also be difficult to navigate, especially when old expectations still linger.

 

Both sides are experiencing dissonance.

 

Perhaps that is why children deal with the issue in very pragmatic ways, and rightly so. When parents are infirm, the immediate concerns must be how to help them in their daily lives and how to keep them safe.

 

Yet, this could lead to perverse outcomes.

 

For example, when we realise our parents are becoming less mobile and more prone to falls, we may impose restrictions on what they can do and where they can go. But, in doing this, are we reducing their sphere of influence even more and possibly depriving them of a social life?

 

Ms Petrina Tan, who heads corporate communications and marketing at Care Corner, said that such restrictions imposed by us could compromise the psychological well-being of the parent.

 

Beyond fixing the immediate problem, it is also important to help our parents through their feelings of grief over the loss of their mobility or autonomy, she added.

 

It does not help that children and parents often do not broach this discussion, perhaps for fear of circling too close to the issue of mortality that can be unsettling for some.

 

Singapore will reach super-aged status by 2026, with the proportion of the population aged 65 and above reaching the 21 per cent mark. This means more children will have to face the reality of their parents growing older and more frail.

 

How should we handle this?

 

As I did my research, it was easier to find advice for new parents having to deal with their young children, than for adult children having to deal with their ageing parents. 

 

So what do ageing parents want from their children?

 

Connection, said Mr Chan. Not just care, and definitely not control.

 

As for my dad, I know what he wants – that parking space. Alas, that is not something I have control over.

 

 

Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Reproduced with permission.

 

 

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