Do you know any adults who are taking advantage of their elderly parents? Are you aware of someone who is abusing credit, stealing resources, or failing to get medical care for an elderly person due to money issues?
If you don't, you are probably among the few. It's becoming common for adults in their forties and fifties to take advantage of the elderly or neglect them.
Reporting such crimes puts the whistleblower in an awkward situation. Nonetheless, we all need to step up to the plate.
Consider a woman we'll call Anna. Anna's adult grandchildren have moved into her home, while Anna still lives there. These adult grandchildren live rent-free and have trashed Anna's house.
"I want my grandchildren out of my home!" Anna told us. "But, my daughter won't say a word to them, and she's moved in, too!"
Anna has some dementia, but she is able to articulate clearly that she's been invaded.
In another case, we know of a daughter who's stolen her father's identity. This daughter, 50-something, allows her adult daughter to borrow money in his grandfather's name and never pay it back.
"I gave my daughter power of attorney," this elderly man told us. "But, she took advantage, ran up credit cards, steals my income to pay the cards, and has ruined my credit and good name."
Both elderly victims in these cases have lost some of their memory, but they know they are being taken advantage of. Each of them could call the authorities or report the abuse to a social worker. However, each would have to be willing to allow a child to go to jail.
In taking a local survey, we found a story similar to these in almost every family. Drugs, poor life choices, divorce, and desperation all play a part. Every adult child in these scenarios seems to have some sort of "good excuse" for taking advantage of an aging parent.
In reality, these adult children and their accomplices -- meaning their spouses and grandchildren of the clan -- need to go to jail.
"My daughter was allowing me to starve!" one woman told us. "She would move money out of my bank account online on the first of every month. She finally asked me to move in with her, because I got thrown out of my apartment for not paying the rent."
This kind of sad family devastation is also taking place with people forced to pay funeral bills and medical bills for family members.
"My husband assumed the medical bills for his father," a 60-year-old woman told us. "We lost our home and everything we owned on account of this."
She goes on to say that when she asked her well-heeled son, 35, for help, he criticized her for "being a fool" for helping pay the bills.
Families disrespecting their members, young or old, is a growing epidemic in our society that few are willing to discuss openly.
"I get stories of people crying on the phone constantly," says a social worker we'll call Tom. "Adult kids are emptying the bank accounts of the elderly. Adults in their sixties are taking drugs hustled by their 40-year-old children."
One of the saddest stores we've heard is this: A mother near 70 talked her daughter, 40, into leaving a drug rehabilitation program to get drugs for both of them. The daughter, facing jail time, left rehab and scored drugs through prostitution.
Relationships problems this intense stem from total loss of family values. Fixing the epidemic starts with confronting family members or reporting crimes to the police.
If we all sit idly by, the problems will only grow worse.
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(Judi Hopson and Emma Hopson are authors of a stress management book for paramedics, firefighters and police, "Burnout To Balance: EMS Stress." Ted Hagen is a family psychologist. Write to them in care of McClatchy-Tribune News Service, 700 12th Street NW, Suite 1000, Washington DC 20005; please enclose a copy of the column and the name of the newspaper you saw it in. You can also contact the authors through the Web site http://.)
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(c) 2009, McClatchy-Tribune News Service
