Love, Limits and Aging Parents

What should you do when an aging parent’s anger becomes physical? In this episode, Esther and Laurie discuss the frightening reality of hitting, pushing, grabbing, throwing objects, blocking exits, and other threatening behavior. They explain how to create a practical safety plan, when to leave, when to call 911, and why dementia or illness may explain aggression without making it safe. This conve...

Sometimes the healthiest way to continue caring for an aging parent is to stop providing every part of that care yourself. In this episode, Esther and Laurie discuss how hiring outside help can reduce conflict, protect caregivers from emotional exhaustion, and create safer boundaries with a difficult parent. They explore the guilt caregivers often feel, the resistance aging parents may show, and p...

When an aging parent becomes angry, demanding, critical, or impossible to reason with, even a simple conversation can turn into a battle. In this episode, Esther and Laurie explain why these interactions escalate so quickly and how caregivers can respond without surrendering their dignity or making the conflict worse. You’ll learn practical phrases for lowering the emotional temperature, recognizi...

What happens when staying connected to an aging parent is destroying your emotional well-being? In this episode, Esther Kane and licensed professional counselor Laurie Newcomb discuss one of the most painful decisions an adult child may face: whether to limit or end contact with an aging parent. They explore emotional abuse, manipulation, repeated boundary violations, dementia-related behavior, si...

Most caregivers never make a safety plan — because making one feels like an accusation. Like you're saying something out loud about your parent, or your family, that you're not ready to say. So instead you improvise. You read the room. You get very, very good at hoping today is a good day. In this episode, Esther and Laurie talk about the two kinds of safety every caregiver needs to plan for — the...

You walk into your parent’s home carrying nothing — and walk out hours later carrying all of it. Their fear. Their anger. Their despair. You take it home, and it becomes your evening, your sleep, your Monday. In this episode, Esther and Laurie explore healthy emotional detachment: how to care for a parent without absorbing their every feeling as your own. They reclaim “detachment” from the cold, n...

Everyone tells you to “just set a boundary.” As if it were simple. As if the person on the other side weren’t your aging parent — the one who needs you, who raised you, who can make you feel like a bad daughter with a single sigh. In this episode, Esther and Laurie get past the slogan and into the real work: what a boundary actually is (and the crucial thing it is not), why guilt shows up the inst...

Somewhere in you, quietly, there’s a hope you may never say out loud: that this time — with age, with illness, with time running short — your parent will finally soften. Finally see you. Finally become the person you needed all along. And every time they don’t, it lands like a fresh wound. In this episode, Esther and Laurie sit with one of the hardest truths in caregiving: you cannot change your p...

Some of us learned early that love had to be earned — by being helpful, agreeable, undemanding. The child who never made waves. The one everyone could count on. Now that same child is grown, doing most of the caregiving, and still quietly waiting for an approval that never quite arrives. In this episode, Esther and Laurie explore the “good child” expectation: how the role gets handed to us in chil...

You show up for your parent every single day — patient, steady, endlessly kind. So why is the one person you’re hardest on always yourself? In this episode, Esther and Laurie sit with the quiet cruelty caregivers turn inward: the guilt, the second-guessing, the relentless inner critic that says you’re never doing enough. They unpack what self-compassion actually is (and the things people wrongly a...

Caregiving can bring up more than exhaustion, worry, and responsibility. It can also uncover a quieter kind of grief: the pain of realizing you never had the parent, or the relationship, you needed. In this episode of Love, Limits and Aging Parents , Esther and Laurie explore what it means to grieve a parent who is still alive. They discuss the emotional absence, criticism, instability, conditiona...

Even as grown adults, many of us still long to hear our parents say, “I’m proud of you.” And when that approval has always felt conditional, or never came at all, caregiving can reopen wounds we thought we had outgrown. In this episode of Love, Limits and Aging Parents , Esther and Laurie explore why the need for parental approval runs so deep, how caregiving can intensify old feelings of rejectio...

You love your parent. You're also exhausted by them. Resentful of them. Maybe relieved when you walk out the door — and then immediately ashamed of that relief. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Esther and Laurie talk about ambivalence: what it actually is, why caregivers carry so much of it in silence, and why feeling conflicted doesn't make you a bad daughter. It makes you an hon...

You love them. You also dread their phone calls. You feel responsible for their happiness — and somehow guilty about your own. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Esther and Laurie unpack one of the most misunderstood dynamics in family caregiving: trauma bonds — the invisible emotional ties that keep adult children locked in cycles of over-giving, hoping, and self-erasure. This isn'...

This is where it all begins. In this foundational episode, Esther Kane and Laurie Newcomb go back to the very reason this show exists — because millions of adult children are carrying something enormous in almost complete silence. The sleepless nights. The resentment they feel ashamed of. The grief they can't quite name. The love that is absolutely real and absolutely exhausting at the same time....

If you love your parent and they've also hurt you, you already know how impossible that feels to explain. In this episode, Esther Kane and Laurie Newcomb explore the emotional complexity that makes caregiving for an abusive parent so uniquely exhausting — and why so many caregivers feel like they can't talk about it honestly with anyone. They dig into the guilt messages that keep caregivers trappe...

Abuse in caregiving relationships is rarely what people expect — and it's almost never talked about openly. In this episode, Esther Kane (retired OT and Certified Aging in Place Specialist) and Laurie Newcomb (licensed professional counselor) tackle one of the most difficult realities family caregivers face: when the person they're caring for is also hurting them. They explore the three most commo...

You spent years — maybe decades — building distance from what happened in that house. And now you're back in the thick of it, not because you wanted to be, but because someone has to help. Caregiving has a way of doing that: pulling the past right into the present, making old wounds feel startlingly fresh. A tone of voice, a familiar criticism, a look — and suddenly you're not a capable adult anym...

If you've ever felt manipulated, guilt-tripped, verbally attacked, or emotionally worn down by the very parent you're trying to care for — this episode is for you. We don't talk enough about what happens when the caregiver is the one being harmed. In this episode of Love, Limits and Aging Parents , we're taking an honest look at emotional and psychological abuse in the caregiver relationship — spe...

Love, Limits and Aging Parents with Esther Kane, OTR/L, CAPS and Laurie Newcomb, LPC Caring for an aging parent is one of the most loving things you can do. It can also be one of the most depleting — especially when love starts to blur into obligation, guilt, or burnout. Love, Limits and Aging Parents is for adult children navigating the hard parts: the conversations that never go the way you plan...