PBS special "Caring for Your Parents" missed a golden opportunity to educate

I hope most of you missed the PBS special "Caring for Your Parents," sponsored by AARP. It appeared April 2 for two hours in prime time. Chock-full of pathos and bathos, there weren't enough violins in the world to pluck at our heartstrings with more emotion — and it gave few insights.

The first 90 minutes showcased five families struggling to keep parents at home. It examined the "tension between siblings and the complexity of shifting caregiver roles" through an "intimate look" into their lives, according to the news release. The last half-hour was a discussion featuring four experts taped before the program was made.

I lasted through the first hour, then turned it off in disgust. If there's one thing that riles me, it's stereotypes, hysteria and plain wrongheadedness glorified in the name of caring for our parents.

There were so many missed opportunities to educate the audience, to show us better ways of doing this, to get us to think about these things ahead of time so we don't have to be as miserable as the people portrayed.

Tragically, this mistreatment of aging in the media is common. Producers are finally awakening to the fact that more of us are growing older, but they're turning the experience into a soap opera. And they're characterizing aging as a hysterical, inevitable and thankless struggle.

The show depicted families making years of relentless sacrifices on behalf of parents who were extraordinarily frail and disabled. It was as though all of us can and should do likewise. In reality, many of us can't and shouldn't — and we shouldn't be made to feel guilty about it.

Then, as though it made everything OK, a voice would say, "And the state provides a caregiver in the home," without a word about the upsides and downsides of such an arrangement — what it means to the family's sense of privacy, how poor you have to be to get the state to pay and what happens if you're not eligible.

The discussion was locked rigidly into keeping an older person at home, with little mention of other choices or how caring for someone at home can rip families apart. The example that irked me the most was the couple who divorced after the wife struggled for years to care for two very impaired parents back to back. She kept saying how angry it made her, yet there was no discussion of what else the family might have done.

The hour that I watched said nothing about geriatric-care managers, a new profession of experts that can help families make wise decisions when caring for a parent. It said nothing about what all this costs, now or in the future, when almost 80 million boomers reach old age (vs. about 35 million now).

With our horrific federal deficits today and endless demand in the future, how will we make this work? What alternatives do we have, since we're marching steadily in that direction?

I complained to AARP's senior manager of media relations, Michelle Alvarez, who responded: "We thought it was a well-balanced show and have been getting very positive feedback but appreciate yours as well. ... "

Now it's time for somebody to have the courage to give us the truth. Without the violins and hankies, we need to learn how to take responsibility for our aging, and to plan for it, so we'll have some control over what happens. There are no magic pills to guarantee us good health, so what are our choices when we become ill? How can we make sure we get good quality care? What does good care cost, and how will we cover it? How do we know when it's OK to stay home and when it's time to move?

So many good questions. Too bad the PBS/AARP special did little to provide good answers.

Most of us age accidentally, without planning or forethought. Aging Deliberately tells us how to age on purpose. You can reach Liz Taylor at lizt@agingdeliberately.com or write to P.O. Box 11601, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110. Her Web site is www.agingdeliberately.com.