I. Understanding Your Parent’s Dementia

1. What Is Dementia? How Is It Different from Just Getting Older?

2. How Can I Know for Sure If My Parent Has Dementia?

3. What Causes Memory Loss?: Alzheimer’s Disease and the Many Other Causes

4. What to Expect: How the Problem Typically Progresses

5. Can Dementia Be Treated to Make It Less Severe?

II. Understanding Your New Relationship with Your Parent

6. Why Caring for Parents with Dementia Is So Much Harder than Caring for Parents with Other Diseases

7. The Biggest Mistake Family Members Make

8. Your New Relationship with Your Parent

9. Your Relationship with Your Other Parent or Stepparent

10. Taking Care of Yourself Is Not an Afterthought

III. Caring Smarter, Not Harder

11. What It Means to Care Smarter

12. How to Communicate with a Parent with Dementia

13. Avoiding Headaches with Your Parent’s Finances

14. When Is It Okay to Lie to Your Parent?

15. Keeping Your Parent Safe at Home

16. Getting Help When Your Parent Lives at Home or with You

17. How to Take Away the Car Keys

18. What Causes Problem Behaviors

19. How to Reduce Problem Behaviors

20. How to Handle Problem Behaviors When They Occur

21. Responding to Your Other Family Members and Friends

IV. The Later Stages

22. Moving Your Parent to a Care Facility

23. How to Choose a Care Facility

24. How Am I Going to Pay for All This?

25. Your Relationship with Your Parent in a Care Facility

26. Dealing with the End of Life

Resources

Notes

Index