Advice From Your Advocates
Advice From Your Advocates
Aging Redefined: Care Strategies & Positive Perspectives
Join Attorney Bob Mannor and aging care expert Dr. Corinne Auman for an insightful conversation on Advice From Your Advocates. Dr. Auman discusses her book Keenagers and shares how her personal experiences shaped her approach to aging care management. Together, they explore the challenges families face during senior healthcare crises, the impact of cultural narratives on aging, and the essential role of care navigators. Learn how positive perspectives on aging can drive better retirement planning and why ageism needs to be actively challenged. This episode offers practical advice for families, caregivers, and individuals wanting to prepare for the future and navigate the complexities of elder care.
Host: Attorney Bob Mannor
Guest: Corinne Auman, PH.D
Executive Producer: Savannah Meksto
Assistant Producer: Samantha Noah
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ABOUT US:
Mannor Law Group helps clients in all matters of estate planning and elder law including special needs planning, veterans’ benefits, Medicaid planning, estate administration, and more. We offer guidance through all stages of life.
We also help families dealing with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other illnesses that cause memory loss. We take a comprehensive, holistic approach, called Life Care Planning. LEARN MORE...
Welcome back to Advice from your Advocates. I'm Bob Manor. I'm a certified elder law attorney in Michigan and I'm really excited about today's podcast. I think you're going to find this really interesting and fun. So we have Dr Corinne Ahman of Choice Care Navigators. Welcome Corinne.
Speaker 2:Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you have a variety of experience and credentials, but just tell us a little about who you are and how you got started in Choice Care Navigators.
Speaker 2:Oh sure. So Choice Care Navigators is a geriatric care management agency, also called Aging Life Care. That's our professional organization and what we do is help families navigate the senior health care industry. So typically people call us when there's some sort of crisis. You know everything was fine until, and you know some sort of event has happened and now they need to figure out everything there is to know about senior care that they yesterday they didn't think they needed to know and today they need to know everything. And so we're the people you call to help you figure all those things out in that moment of crisis.
Speaker 2:But I do love it when people call me way ahead of time because they're planning and they're thinking and they're getting ready for these older adult years. But that I'd say I get. Of 10 phone calls, maybe half a phone call is one of those. Most of them are the crisis sort of thing, and so that's what I do for my day job. And then I also am an advocate for changing how we think about aging, kind of reframing our views on aging, because one of the things I think keeps people from planning for their older adult years calling an attorney, getting their paperwork in order, doing the planning, doing the talking is just this really negative story we have around aging and all the fear mongering we do around aging just kind of in our cultural narrative that makes people deny it rather than base it, and I think there's so much empowerment and a positive story around aging and there is a lot to look forward to.
Speaker 2:It is not all doom and gloom, and so if we can focus on those things, it actually helps us plan and prepare to make it the best experience it can be.
Speaker 1:Now, where are you geographically and what families that would like to interact with you? Do they need to be in a certain area geographically? I know that you have. We're going to talk about your book and the cause that you're promoting here, but from your day job are you mostly working with folks that are right around your geographic area.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm in North Carolina and I'm right in the center of the state, near Greensboro, north Carolina, and so that's where you would interact with me specifically for my day job. But there are people like me all over the country and our professional organization, aging Life Care you can go to their website, aginglifecareorg, and there is a search feature that you can search by zip code for people just like me all across the United States.
Speaker 1:That's great, out of curiosity. So you use terms that we use and so there are a small, very small group of lawyers that do a similar thing and we incorporate sort of the legal and financial planning as part of that care navigation, as part of that life care planning, and so you use similar language. Have you ever encountered lawyers like that or worked with lawyers in a situation where you know we can kind of collaborate together?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely yeah, Because if people are really planning for those years, they need to be thinking about, okay, where, if I were to need care, am I going to stay at home? What does that cost? How do I budget for that? What are my options Like, what kinds of things can I do at home? What kinds of things house modifications or other things how do we budget for those? Do we go ahead and do that? If I'm going to be in a facility, what do the facilities cost? How do I plan appropriately for that? What kind of paperwork do I need to have done?
Speaker 2:Because if you're going to move into a facility, they want to see that you've done a healthcare power of attorney and all of that sort of legal stuff that the attorney is going to be helping you with.
Speaker 2:And then if people are thinking that they're going to do like financial planning and they're going to try to protect their assets so that they might qualify for Medicaid in the future, that's okay. But one of the discussions I want to have with them is let's talk about how that changes your options for care when you actually get to that stage. Because if you say to me I'm going to pay privately for my care. You know your options are wide open in terms of where you might go. But if you say I'm going to use Medicaid, that actually narrows your options quite a bit and we want to talk about you know the facilities that will accept that form of payment versus if you're private pay, because it really does change the outlook for the care that you're going to get and if that's what you want to do, that's your decision. But I think it's very important to go into that with open eyes about you know who's going to accept that payment and who's not.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I agree with you on that. So, as you know, that varies from state to state what programs are going to cover, and so there's a lot of lawyers, so there's sort of three sort of levels of lawyers that do this type of thing. So there's a lot of lawyers, so there's sort of three sort of levels of lawyers that do this type of thing. So there's a lot of lawyers that do help people with those government benefits, including veterans benefits, which is a lot more flexible than Medicaid often. But then there's a group of attorneys that don't really actually get involved in applying for benefits, but they're telling people in advance oh, you should plan for these things. They won't be there for you when you decide to apply for those benefits. They're just trying to tell you years in advance that you should protect your assets. And that's where I think your conversation is very relevant for folks that they think, okay, well, my lawyer said that I've done a plan that can help me get medicaid. Well, do you know what that means? What will that get you? And I think that's a very important conversation.
Speaker 1:The third level is what we do and, like I said, there's a small group of us that do this, where, not only are we incorporating the government benefits and those types of things in the legal planning and making sure that we have all the permissions and documents in place, we are actively involved in care advocacy, and so that's a really important part of it to see that. Okay, we're not a lot of my clients I've seen me about this come in a crisis situation, like you said, but a lot of our folks are coming in and we're not looking at Medicaid. We might be looking at it as a future plan, but we're looking at it from a standpoint of making good decisions, leveraging the money that we have, making sure that the family understands the landscape of what's out there and making sure they can get the best care that they can get for their family members, whether it be in their home or outside of their home Absolutely so. I know we're going to get to your book in just a second, but I'd like to. I'm really curious about how you got into this area and what you know. What brought this passion to you?
Speaker 2:Sure. So my personal story, I think, is a lot like a lot of people who are in the senior care world, in that I had grandparents who I adored and I happened to live right next door to them growing up and we went from these are my mom's parents and we went from having both grandparents there to my grandfather getting sick and passing away pretty quickly, and when that happened my mom and her sister went what felt like overnight from having two parents to only having one, and then realizing very quickly that my grandfather had been protecting my grandmother and hiding coping for her memory deficits.
Speaker 2:So she had dementia and they realized very quickly that she could not be left alone and he had been taking care of her. So I watched that happen when I was in like eighth grade and she did not pass away until I was a junior in college. And so I spent my entire high school and college years watching my mom and her sister try to navigate this right, like having caregivers in the home, having not so great caregivers in the home, having to put her in a facility, picking the wrong facility having to switch.
Speaker 2:You know, just kind of making all the decisions with no guidance and just thinking at the time. Why isn't there somebody who helps you with this, like why?
Speaker 2:isn't there somebody you call and they say, okay, here are your options and here's what they cost and here's what you do and fast forward. I went on and got my PhD in developmental psychology and my specialty is adulthood and aging, and I went to. I've been teaching at universities in the either the psychology or the gerontology programs and in 2012, I finally looked at my husband and said you know, that business I've always talked about that. There ought to be somebody who helps you navigate these things, helps you figure them out. If I'm ever going to start it, it's time to do it, because things have only gotten more complicated since my grandmother passed away. And so the short version of the long story about how I got into the field in the first place. So I was obviously already interested in working with older adults. You know, I went and got that degree, but it just took me a while to get up the gumption to say, ok, I'm actually going to go start a business.
Speaker 1:Very nice. So let's get into your book a little bit. It's kind of a fun title, so it's Keenagers. Am I saying that, right, keenagers? Am I saying that, right, keenager?
Speaker 2:Yeah, with a K yeah.
Speaker 1:Keenager telling a new story about aging. So let's talk about your book. How did it come about? And tell us a little bit more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the book itself is about how older adulthood today is different than what our stereotypes would have us believe. It's different than the older adulthood that your parents or grandparents might have experienced, because we're living longer, we're living healthier. You're two times more likely to enter your 60s today with no chronic conditions than people were 100 years ago, and so All that has changed. And yet our story about aging, our stereotypes about aging, the words we use for older adulthood have not changed. If you're 60, we call you an older adult, and if you're 99, we call you an older adult. There is no other time period in life where we would take people who are over 30 years apart in age and say, hey, you two are basically the same, right, there's just that doesn't happen. And so the book is about how things have changed, trying to tell a new story, trying to use some new language. Right, this word teenager around aging and a positive word. That's the other thing. If you think about, what are some positive words about aging?
Speaker 2:Yeah it's really difficult. So I feel like it's really important to try to reframe that story, to reshape that story because and this comes from my care management practice too story because and this comes from my care management practice too I see the difference in the people who are looking forward to growing older those calls I do get about planning and those are the people who have a positive outlook. They don't have like a, you know, it's all going to be great, nothing's ever going to go wrong, they know. But they're looking forward to those years and they're thinking how do I make this the very best it can be? What do I need to do? How do I talk to my family members? You know, what do I need to make this go as well as it can possibly go Versus the people who have a really negative outlook and who are afraid of it.
Speaker 2:They just kind of bury their heads in the sand. They don't talk about it, they don't plan for it. And that is the crisis call that I get, where people are like we didn't, we didn't. We've never discussed this, we've never talked about it. I don't know what they want. I don't know how much money they have. I don't know what they want. I don't know how much money they have. I don't know anything.
Speaker 2:So I think the power of a positive aging story, a positive aging perspective, is that you will look forward and go what do I need to do to make this the best it can possibly be? And that there are things to look forward to as we grow older, because there are. You talk to any maybe not any, but you talk to most older adults and they'll tell you all the pros. And there's actually research on happiness. There's the U-curve. Of happiness tells us that people are happy when they're young and they don't have a ton of responsibilities. We get into midlife and we get stressed out, but people actually report the highest levels of happiness in their 60s, 70s and 80s.
Speaker 2:So, there are things to look forward to that our cultural narrative around aging would tell you would not have you believe, and that's why I think it's really important to change it.
Speaker 1:I love everything that you're saying. I do a lot of talking to groups and talking to older folks that you know I'm getting into that category of older folks myself, but the idea is one of the things I often will talk about just to get people thinking in this kind of same framework is that all through our lives we're kind of planning for different stages, right. So when we get out of high school, that's a huge. My daughter just graduated high school last year. That was a huge transition and there was a whole lot of planning around that. Are we going to go in the military? Are we going to go to college? Are we going to try to, you know, find a career? Are we going to go in the military? Are we going to go to college? Are we going to try to find a career? Are we going to get a trade? There's just a whole lot of planning around that. Certainly, when you get out of college a whole lot of planning Everybody thinks about that and everybody understands that as a transitionary time and that we need to plan for it.
Speaker 1:When we start thinking about marriage, start thinking about kids that's obviously something that people plan for years for sometimes and then, of course, when we start thinking about retirement.
Speaker 1:I'm often brought in as a speaker to places where they say, well, these folks are probably thinking about retiring in about 10 years, so they're planning 10 years in advance for that, saying, okay, we're getting ready to retire, and then all of a sudden it's like, okay, you retired, now, everything's perfect and everything's.
Speaker 1:You know, not that everything's perfect necessarily, but there's no planning. Nobody thinks about all the transitions that are going to occur between retirement and death and I'm not afraid, you know, I think it's important to talk about death as part of that too, because that is a thing that we should not avoid talking about. And so I do think it's very interesting and I encourage people and I'll encourage folks to read your book and get more information from you, because it is something that if more folks would kind of take that like they do every other part of their life, and say, hey, this requires some planning to, this requires some thinking through. There are going to be some transitions and some changes, especially as we get into some of the later stages, and the later stages could be in your 60s, they could be in your 90s, they could be at any time. We don't know when that's going to be, but that requires additional thought, process and planning and talking to the family and things like that thought process and planning and talking to the family and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when Social Security was first enacted in the 1930s the average American lifespan was 67 years. So you got Social Security at 65, and we expected you to be in quote retirement for a couple of years. Today, the average lifespan is around 77 years. So we're again, that's back to we're living longer, we're living healthier and again, that's just the average. We've got people living into their 80s, 90s and beyond you know, a lot more than we've ever had before.
Speaker 2:And so when you think about retiring at 65, you're not just looking at a couple of years, you're looking at decades of your life still ahead of you, and that it's very typical for people to retire and then kind of have a honeymoon period where they're really happy right, because nobody wants to continue their 40 hour work week. But then after a couple of years you can kind of become discontented because it's like, well, what am I going to do? Right, unlimited relaxation is fun for a while, but then it can kind of become boring. So what are you going to do with these decades of your life socially, emotionally, to give you purpose, to make you want to get out of bed on a Wednesday morning?
Speaker 2:Sometimes, when I say something like that, somebody will say, well, what's going to give me purpose in retirement is sitting around and doing nothing. And I get it, because we kind of have this cultural narrative around retirement that it is like unlimited relaxation, that you're well-earned rest, and it can be those things and also be a time when you find purpose, find meaning in whatever brings you joy. You know, maybe it's going back to work, maybe it's starting a new business, maybe it's volunteering, maybe it's caregiving for your grandchildren, who knows? But you will want to find something to do, and kind of planning for that is really helpful. To say, okay, yeah, I don't have to work 40 hours a week. What would I like to do now? That's going to make me want to get out of bed in the morning.
Speaker 1:I want to go back on something that you said a while back about your grandfather. When he passed, you guys realized that he was kind of covering for your grandmother. We see that very frequently and it's very interesting, especially when there's a memory issue involved. Families tend to try to hide it, or cocoon within the house to try to hide it, or cocoon within the house, and really you know that's not good for Grandpa because now he's not getting the social interaction and engagement that he needs and he's having to try to hide this. But we see it all the time and I think what you're saying is having these conversations can kind of open that up to say, look, a lot of almost everybody you're going to talk to has that in their family or they know someone that was suffering from memory loss, dementia, alzheimer's, you know, and that this is not a taboo that we have to hide.
Speaker 1:But that is still. We see this all the time that the family comes in. We see this as we're recording here today. We're coming up to thanksgiving and christmas. Some of our biggest surges of people calling us is when the family comes home for Thanksgiving, family comes home for Christmas. They had no idea until that. They see it in person that how much of a struggle that their parents are having and that hasn't been talked about or exposed to them if they're not coming over or they're not seeing it, and even sometimes, when they are seeing it, it's being hidden from them by, you know, by a loving spouse or sometimes a loving child, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely no, it's. The holidays are our biggest time of the year too November, december, january in care management. Because same thing people come home and they they find out that things aren't going the way they thought they were going, and then we get those same phone calls.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so tell us a little bit more about the book. I'm really interested in that. It takes a lot to write a book, and so what was your thought process, what was your process for writing that book?
Speaker 2:Well, my thought process I'd been talking about writing a book for five plus years at least and I finally decided hey, no, I'm really going to do this.
Speaker 2:And I have a great quote up here on my wall that says writing is the process by which you realize you do not understand what you are talking about.
Speaker 2:Because I think I started off thinking I was really going to write a book about care management right, like planning and preparing from kind of a care management perspective and then, as I got into writing it, I was like no, because I think I go give some of those same types of talks you do about planning and all the things you need to do to prepare, and I feel like that not that there isn't purpose in that, but sometimes it kind of falls on deaf ears. And the reason it falls on deaf ears is because people are afraid of it and they don't want to talk about it because they're afraid of it. And so what I really want to talk about is why people shouldn't be afraid of it and everything there is to look forward to, because I do believe that if I can reshape how you start to think about your own aging, you can start to see that planning process as empowering.
Speaker 2:Absolutely it's giving you control over how this goes, because we do. We have an enormous amount of control over how these years are going to go, but you have to take that power for yourself. You have to say I'm going to decide how this goes, I'm going to look forward to it, I'm going to get all my ducks in a row, that kind of stuff, and I really think the negative outlook is our biggest obstacle. And so that's how the book kind of shifted from I'm going to talk about care management and what you need to do to prepare to no, I really want to talk about those things, but I want to talk about them in the framework of let's overcome ageism, let's overcome our fear of aging. Let me give you a lot of examples. I have a bunch of interviews in the book with people who are the teenagers, as I name them, to say here are people who are doing really interesting, fun things in these older adult years, and this could be you too, if you so choose. That's the point.
Speaker 1:That's great. What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions about aging? I know this is a big topic for you, so I think we all kind of get our awareness of things sometimes from the culture, from movies, just maybe from our parents. There are certain things that we just that they are cultural beliefs, and so what are some of the misconceptions that you would say need to be exposed?
Speaker 2:so I think the the biggest things are that it's all downhill, right, that, um, all the negative kind of stereotypes that we have. I mean, just go look in the birthday card section for anybody over 40, right? It's like we only have one thing to say to you on your birthday after the age of 40, and that's that you're old, right.
Speaker 2:And so this idea that and we're all cooking in this cultural soup all the time, right, so we're all ageists, we are all the time right, so we're all ageist, we are all ageist. I really try not to be and it's so hard. But my husband caught me the other day. I had some headphones and they were my old headphones and they weren't connecting to my phone and I said, oh, these are my old ones, they're just old and cranky. And he looked at me and he said you know, that's ageist, right. And I'm like, oh, you know, so i's ageist, right. And I'm like, oh, you know, so I'm hyper aware. And yet I'm still saying out loud these kind of ageist tropes, right, these phrases that are just all around us all the time.
Speaker 2:And the thing is there's a researcher, dr Becca Levy, up at the Yale School of Public Health, and she has a ton of research about how having a positive outlook on aging, having just a positive stereotype about that it's going to, there are things to look forward to and that you know it's going to be good, that adds seven additional years to your life.
Speaker 2:You walk faster when you have a positive outlook. You are 44% more likely to recover from a serious life-threatening injury. If you have a positive outlook about aging, so we have so much power in just our own mind about how this is going to go based on that outlook that we have. And that is so wonderful and also so hard, because we are living in this society that is just bombarding us all the time with the negative aging stereotypes and the tropes. And that makes sense because the anti-aging industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry, so a lot of people are making a lot of money off of your fear of growing older. But just the power we have over our own lives based on how we're looking at it right, are you looking forward to it and thinking it's going to be good, or are you thinking, oh man, it's all downhill from here. You know, aging sucks and it's like maybe don't say that out loud and don't say it in your own head either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that leads me. So I really think that's great and it leads me to a conversation I think we should have about those crisis situations where there's a family that has a crisis situation. They come to you and what I want to kind of talk about it in the context of, of course, there's going to be a crisis. There's going to be for most of us at least, most of us are going to experience it in our family, if not for ourselves, and the idea of approaching it with that kind of attitude.
Speaker 1:So it's true, a lot of folks aren't going to plan ahead, like we both would like them to do, and they are going to come into a crisis, and so then we can look at that crisis in a way of being very negative about it and really, you know, just trying to hide the situation, not engage, not get the interactions and get the advice and services and options that we have. Or we can approach it with the idea okay, here's a thing, all right, grandpa has memory loss. All right, grandpa has memory loss, grandpa has dementia or some form of dementia, all right, so that's, that's a, that's true, that's a reality. What are we going to do about it? We can hide it and cocoon in our house and and have it affect, you know, the family's life, because we're all trying to hide it and cocoon and not you know have those interactions, trying to hide it and cocoon and not, you know, have those interactions.
Speaker 1:Or we can still try to get the best quality of life that we can, knowing that there is a fact of life that someone has Alzheimer's or someone has vascular dementia or whatever it is, and approach it with that same kind of attitude of this is true. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to take that negative approach, just like you talked about, or are we going to approach it with a little bit of a hopefulness about it to say what can we do to make the quality of life of not just grandpa but also grandma and kids and the kids that live next door? So I'd like you to talk a little bit about that of next door.
Speaker 2:So I'd like you to talk a little bit about that. So I'm with you. I mean, I see that all the time, in the sense that some families approach it almost as if they feel like it's shameful that this has happened to their family and the downside of that is, yeah, that they cocoon, but also that they miss out on a ton of resources and things that could assist them. You know, I had a family one time that the husband had dementia, the wife was the caretaker and I, you know, I asked her OK, who's, who could, who can help you? Right, like the kids weren't close by, but like she had a church family and things like that. I said who could come help you?
Speaker 1:And she said well, they would help me.
Speaker 2:She said, but I don't, I don't want them to see him like this and so she would not ask for help because she didn't want other people to see her husband the way he was then and that, ultimately, is going to burn her out. You know, because she she needs help, she needs support, all those things. The other thing that I see families do that I actually think is a pro sometimes, when parents or some member of the family is cocooning or not handling it well, they didn't prepare, they didn't plan. When I'm working with the adult children in that situation, they often are kind of watching the train wreck that is happening with their parents and they go I am never going to do this Right, I am never going to do this to my children, I am never going to do this to myself.
Speaker 2:And so it can be quite a catalyst for those adult children to go do their planning right, For them to start to say how do I put things in place to make sure this never happens? And I do. I hate that that's happening with the older generation in that case. But I do think that the adult children learn a lot. They cause, they see what, because they see what can go wrong, and that teaches them something that you know, me saying it to them and you saying it to them doesn't always make it sink in. But when they watch it happen, they realize and then they will start to make their own plans very quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate everything that you're doing and the efforts that you're making to address ageism and really kind of reframe this, which is great. Any tips that you want to leave our listeners that you think might be helpful? So our listeners are often people in the long-term care industry, social workers, people in the healthcare industry and then, of course, just the general public that might be listening. So any tips that you would like to leave them with?
Speaker 2:So I really do think our negative story around aging and ageism is one of our number one things we have to combat, both as a society, excuse me and internally. And I think it starts with each of us kind of stopping and saying, like where my husband called me out, you know on my own, on my own ageism, but stopping to say how am I viewing older adulthood, how am I viewing older adults? Do I have these negative internalized beliefs about aging? And you probably do, because we've all been raised in this world and trying to check that at the door as much as we possibly can, because once you start to pay attention to the ageism in the world, you will see it everywhere, I mean just all the time. But I think it takes each of us paying attention to it, calling it out when we see it and going.
Speaker 2:You know that's really ageist what you just said, which can be quite uncomfortable because a lot of things people say they just say because that's just conversation, that's the joke you make that sort of stuff. That's the only way Like if you don't like how older people are treated or viewed. Today I have news for you that we are all old people in training. Right, this is coming for all of us viewed and treated today. The only way we're going to change that is by changing our own views and working to change the views of other people in our society about older adulthood, so that then you and I are not viewed and treated the same way when we get there.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. So I encourage everybody to check out Dr Curran-Ammon's book Teenagers with a K Telling a New Story About Aging. It's a fantastic book. And, dr Corinne, if people were interested in getting more information, obviously they can probably get your book from Amazon or other sources. What would be the best way if they wanted to get more information about you and the work that you do?
Speaker 2:Sure. So my website is just my name, it's corinnaulmancom and there you can find links to the book, links to all my social media accounts, things like that.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you've enjoyed this podcast and you want to make sure that you don't miss any of them, make sure to subscribe. You can find us at any place that you listen to podcasts, or you can go to our website at manorlawgroupcom, or you can find us on YouTube. Thanks so much and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:To learn more, visit manorlawgroupcom.
