Caretaking for Aging Parents

Caring with Compassion: Mental Health for Caretakers of Aging Parents is a 6-week supportive learning experience designed for adult children and family members who are actively providing care to aging parents. Whether you’re new to the caregiving role or have years of experience, this course offers a comprehensive emotional, psychological, and practical foundation to help you sustain both your caregiving and your well-being.

Caregiving can be both a deeply meaningful and profoundly challenging journey. While rooted in love, responsibility, and duty, caregiving also often brings stress, guilt, isolation, and emotional fatigue. This course helps you understand and navigate those complexities through a structured, trauma-informed approach that honors your lived experience.

Over the course of six weeks, you will:

• Explore the emotional landscape of caregiving, including common but often unspoken feelings such as grief, resentment, identity loss, and burnout.

• Learn how to identify early warning signs of emotional and physical exhaustion, and how to intervene with supportive self-awareness and self-compassion.

• Build a personalized self-care framework, recognizing that caregiving cannot be sustained from a place of depletion.

• Practice emotional regulation tools such as deep breathing, mindfulness, gratitude journaling, and visualization to manage day-to-day stressors.

• Strengthen communication skills for navigating difficult conversations with aging parents, siblings, and other family members—especially when needs or roles change.

• Map out your social support system and discover community, technological, and professional resources designed specifically for caregivers.

• Create a long-term wellness and resilience plan that anticipates future challenges, incorporates regular self-reflection, and fosters emotional sustainability.

Each session includes carefully crafted instructional content, real-life reflections, skill-building activities, short quizzes, and open-ended assignments that encourage you to integrate what you’ve learned into your daily caregiving life. Participants will also engage in guided journaling and practical planning exercises to make emotional growth and mental health maintenance feel achievable and ongoing.

By the end of the course, you will have:

• A clearer understanding of your emotional responses as a caregiver

• Tools to protect and prioritize your mental and physical health

• Communication frameworks that promote empathy and boundaries

• A personal toolkit of resources and support networks

• A realistic, personalized caregiver resilience plan for the months and years ahead

This course honors the reality that you cannot pour from an empty cup—and helps you refill yours with intention, connection, and care.