If your parent currently lives alone, at some point you will need to consider help or change. That's a fact. In a recent AARP poll, 40% of the 45-year-old women surveyed admitted to having talked to a parent about living independently, and if you are reading this, you probably carry on the same conversations (Who's Talking with Mom & Dad?, 2007). The AARP estimated in 2002 that 8.7 million people living at home needed help in at least one area of daily care. That was a whopping 27% of our parents. As your parent's needs increase, the conversation takes on an urgency and life all its own. The goal is to keep your parent safely independent for as long as possible, to supplement necessary care until that final moment when the need for care exceeds the multiplicity of resources available.
How do you kow if your parent can safely remain alone? We're giving you some assessment tools for determining your parent's needs in a systematic way. Your intuition serves as a warning bell worthy of attention, but you need concrete information. Remove the tools from the back of the manual, and put them to use!
