The hour to talk to your parents about who will care for them is while they still feel in control of the answer. Princella Seymour, the founder of Complete Elder Solutions, has worked with older adults for more than three decades, and she puts the timing plainly. “The time to have the conversations are now,” she said. “You want to talk about them during happy moments…and when they feel that they’re in control. Not when they feel like they’re losing control.”
More than 61 million Americans are 65 or older and that number is expected to pass 80 million in the coming decades. Nearly 70 percent of people turning 65 will need some form of long-term care, a figure she attributes to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Seymour tells families to start the serious planning conversations around 65.
She traces the work back to childhood. “I was always the one hanging around the older people growing up,” she said. The gap she built a business around showed up later, in a pattern she watched repeat. “My residents would get discharged,” she said. “Their families would either be not connected, far away, or they would not have any children at all.” What was missing was not medical. “They didn’t have an accountability partner. They didn’t have a support system outside.”
“I sell peace of mind every day, all day,” she said. Complete Elder Solutions is built for the family that does not know what the next step is, and her first instruction to them is to stop performing certainty about it. “Be okay with not knowing,” she said.
The cost she sees now is landing on the people doing the caring rather than on the people being cared for. “I’m starting to see a lot of sickness and disease come from it because…they’re getting caregiver burnout,” she said. What she tells them is to stop subtracting from their own lives first. “Do not give up your vacations. Do not give up your me days,” she said. “Put your village in place.” Seymour became a mother at 44.
