One social worker recounted a typical case of a 72-year-old mother who let her 48- year-old daughter with addiction issues and her 20-year-old grandson with mental health issues move in with her in her one-bedroom apartment. “I didn’t know what else to do,” the elderly mother said. “They were homeless.” After six months, she was at the end of her rope and verging on a breakdown when she came to social services for help. “I can’t put them out. They would be homeless again. I can’t leave myself or they would stop paying rent and cause other mischief that would end in the same result. I can’t go on like this much longer or I’ll have a breakdown myself. I don’t know what to do.”
This case illustrates how aging, mothering, older adult abuse, adult children’s mental illness, substance abuse, and unemployment all overlap, and how they can determine the trajectory of a woman’s later years. Many clinicians feel frustrated when working with older mothers who, on the one hand, seek services to protect themselves from their adult children, but on the other are unwilling to take the necessary safety precautions. Our one-bedroom apartment mother summed up her feelings like this: “If not me, who?”
Social workers who work with elderly mothers living with a difficult or even abusive adult child try to help them understand that this is not necessarily an all-or-nothing choice. There are no models for transforming mothering in later life with difficult grown children, but therapists have been supporting elderly mothers who feel trapped by utilizing a Stages of Change therapeutic model with some success.
This model operates on the assumption that people do not change behaviors quickly and decisively. Rather, change in behavior, especially habitual behavior, occurs continuously through a cyclical process. The TTM is not a theory but a model; different behavioral theories and constructs can be applied to various stages of the model where they may be most effective.
The TTM posits that individuals move through five stages of change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. For each stage of change, different intervention strategies are most effective at moving the person to the next stage of change and subsequently through the model to maintenance, the ideal stage of behavior.
Elderly Mothers
Though often lengthy and sometimes painful for elderly mothers who cling to moral and cultural beliefs about being good mothers, social workers report that this is the only model that has helped to gradually unburden elderly mothers as they retire into old age.
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