Protect Our Parents

08/18/2026

08/18/2026

A Four Corners investigation can reveal the number of people waiting for full aged care funding at home stands at almost 154,000 — not 100,000 as officially reported.

08/18/2026

What am I doing?

I’m taking concepts and research that often sit in separate disciplines and systems, applying them to elder abuse, and building analytical frameworks that can help families, advocates and professionals recognize and interpret what is happening.

My work crosses family dynamics, financial exploitation, undue influence, coercion and control, aging, decision-making, and the legal, protective, medical and financial systems that interact with them.

The questions began with my own experience, which spanned eight years. I wanted to understand not only what happened, but how it happened, why it continued, and why it was so difficult to stop.

So I research. I synthesize. I apply what I learn to my own experience and to what I continue to see through advocacy work.

And I discover things as I build the series.

A concept developed in one field can help explain something we are seeing in another. Research can change how I understand something I witnessed years ago. Looking across systems can expose gaps that aren’t as easy to see when each system, event or issue is examined separately.

Each piece teaches a concept. Together, I’m building a framework for examining how elder abuse develops and operates, how people respond to it, how those responses are interpreted, and what happens when the situation encounters the systems meant to respond.

Ultimately, I’m trying to understand some very difficult questions:

Why can elder abuse continue even after people begin to see it? Why is it so difficult to stop? And why can accountability be so difficult to achieve?

08/18/2026

I knew something was wrong the moment I walked into my father’s bedroom.

He saw me and quickly shoved a piece of paper under the pillows on his bed.

Then I saw his face. Piercing ice blue eyes. not the ones I knew.

He was angry with me.

There was something different in the way he was looking at me, and I couldn’t understand it.

My father and I were close. He had once told me, “I trust you with my life.”

So what happened?

I had stopped by his condo to have coffee, something I did all the time. We hadn’t had an argument. In fact, we don’t argue. I hadn’t done anything that explained the sudden change in him.

And my father didn’t hide things from me.

When he left the room to use the bathroom, I reached under the pillow and took a picture of the paper. I wanted to know what he was hiding.

Later, I looked at the photograph.

It was a computer printout explaining guardianship and the process for establishing incapacity. Parts were highlighted. In my sister Joan’s handwriting, an arrow pointed toward the language about incapacity with a warning that I was bringing a doctor and lawyer to have my father declared incompetent.

It wasn’t true.

My father had agreed to meet with an elder law attorney to help him sort through the problems and chaos he was already dealing with.

I already knew his caregiver was interfering with our relationship. She controlled much of his transportation and access, was locking me out of his home, and was increasingly creating problems between us.

What shocked me was seeing that my sister was involved too.

The next day, I received a certified letter telling me that my father had revoked my durable power of attorney.

The revocation hadn’t just happened.

It had been signed three months earlier.

My sister had prepared it, and his caregiver had taken him to the bank to have it notarized. Yet for three months, my father had never mentioned it to me.

The following day, he met with a new attorney.

Two days later, he was in the hospital. While there, he signed a new estate plan.

At the time, I kept coming back to the same question:

How could my father believe them over me?

This was a man who had once told me, “I trust you with my life.” And he meant it. I had been his health care proxy for years. I went to medical appointments with him, helped care for him and had twice been there in medical emergencies that saved his life.

I think this is one of the hardest things for families to understand about undue influence.

We think the strength and history of a relationship should protect against influence. I certainly did. My relationship with my father gave me every reason to think that.

Yet something was changing.

How does someone come to distrust a person they trusted for years? How does a longstanding relationship change? What happened before the new belief, the new behavior or the new decision appeared?

Those questions cannot be answered by looking only at the final decision.

You have to look at how the person got there.

That is why I created Undue Influence 101.

People are allowed to change their minds. A surprising decision, standing alone, does not prove undue influence.

But neither does a signature tell us how that decision came to be.

Change matters enormously, and change proves nothing by itself.

08/18/2026

08/17/2026

One of the most baffling things my sisters and I experienced during my father’s abuse was watching his behavior change.

He would say things that didn’t sound like him. He sometimes repeated accusations and explanations we believed were coming from the people around him. He denied or minimized things we knew he had previously been concerned about.

We used to say he was “parroting” them.

For a long time, I kept asking why.

Why would someone who knows something is wrong go along with it?

Why complain privately and then deny the same problem to someone who could help?

Why suddenly say you don’t want to see people you have always been close to?

We need to better understand the environment. What changed around them? Who provides the care? Who controls transportation, money, communication or access to the home? What does the person depend on someone else for? What happens when they disagree?

My father still exercised agency. That scared me, because I didn’t recognize his choices as part of who he was. His decisions were out of character.

There were times when he arranged to meet us for coffee, lunch or a doctor’s appointment rather than have us pick him up.

He once said:

“I hate sneaking around like this, but what can I do?”

That wasn’t an absence of agency. He was problem-solving.

He wanted to see his daughters. He also understood that doing so openly could create problems after we left. So he found a way to maintain contact while trying to manage what would happen afterward.

That helped me understand that changed behavior does not necessarily mean changed preference.

Sometimes people change their minds. Relationships change. An older person has every right to decide whom they want to see and what they want to do.

But sometimes behavior changes because the consequences of acting on a preference have changed.

That distinction matters when outsiders become involved.

If an older person says, “I don’t want to see my daughter right now,” take those words seriously.

But don’t give them meaning they don’t necessarily contain.

“I don’t want to see her right now” does not automatically mean “I no longer want a relationship with my daughter.”

And we shouldn’t simply substitute our own judgment and decide what the person “really wants,” either.

We need to understand the conditions surrounding the choice.

What does the person want?
What constraints are present?
What does the person believe will happen if they choose differently?
How are they adapting to those consequences?
And what changed before the behavior changed?

The purpose isn’t to explain away an older person’s answer. It is to understand it.

Autonomy can narrow while agency remains.

And sometimes behavior that looks inexplicable from the outside makes a lot of sense once we understand the choices and consequences the person is navigating every day.


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08/14/2026

I recently came across an article about what can happen to sibling relationships when a parent declines or dies.

The author described one parent as the “glue” that held the family together. After her death, the family fell apart.

I recognized the pattern immediately. I had seen it in my own family, I’ve seen it in other relatives and friends, and I’ve seen it through my advocacy work. I continue seeing versions of it again and again.

But I think there is another piece to this.

The parent who holds the family together doesn’t have to die for the family structure to change.

Sometimes that parent begins to decline, or their spouse dies, and sometimes illness, dementia or increasing dependence changes the role they have always played in the family.

The parent is still there. But the family structure around them begins to shift. Questions arise and decisions need to be made.

Who provides the care?
Who handles the money?
Who drives them?
Who speaks with doctors?
Who has access?
Who holds the POA?

And slowly, or sometimes very quickly, family roles become power.

Old sibling resentments may resurface and disagreements over caregiving may begin.

But sometimes something more serious is happening. Money and inheritance can enter the minds of some but not others and someone takes advantage of the change.

That distinction matters because a family experiencing conflict during a parent’s decline is not the same thing as someone exploiting that period of vulnerability to gain access, money, assets or control.

But from the outside, both may simply look like a family fighting.

That is one of the reasons I became interested in the phrase “family dynamics” in the first place.

Family dynamics can help us understand the history and vulnerabilities. They may even help explain how one person gained influence or control.

But “family dynamics” should never become the explanation for everything that happens after that.

We still need to examine the circumstances surrounding change.

That is where I began this series.

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Elder Abuse & Family Dynamics, Part 1:
Family Dynamics in Elder Financial Exploitation