Caregivers Quotes

My caregiver mantra is to remember 'The only control you have is over the changes you choose to make.

Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.--Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver

Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents’ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.

Caregiving will never be one-size-fits-all.

All infants and children require and deserve comfort in order to develop properly. Soft cooing voices, gentle touch, smiles, cleanliness, and wholesome food all contribute to the growing body/mind. And when these basic conditions are absent in childhood, our need for comfort in adulthood can be so profound that it becomes pathological, driving us to seek mothering from anyone who will have us, to use others to fill our emptiness with sex or love, and to risk becoming addicted to a perceived source of comfort.

For every wounded warrior, there is a myltitude of family, friends, and communities who are forever changed.

Where there were once several competing approaches to medicine, there is now only one that matters to most hospitals, insurers, and the vast majority of the public. One that has been shaped to a great degree by the successful development of potent cures that followed the discovery of sulfa drugs. Aspiring caregivers today are chosen as much (or more) for their scientific abilities, their talent for mastering these manifold technological and pharmaceutical advances as for their interpersonal skills. A century ago most physicians were careful, conservative observers who provided comfort to patients and their families. Today they act: They prescribe, they treat, they cure. They routinely perform what were once considered miracles. The result, in the view of some, has been a shift in the profession from caregiver to technician. The powerful new drugs changed how care was given as well as who gave it.

Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.-- Dementia Patient Rose in The Inspired Caregiver

Caregivers, like all of us, inevitably reflect their culture's attitude toward children and life. The story goes that when Pearl Buck was a child in China, someone asked how she compared her mother to her Chinese amah. Buck replied, "If I want to have a story read, I go to my mother. But if I fall down and need to be comforted, I go to my amah." Her mother's culture valued teaching and learning, while her amah's placed a greater value on nurture. Even as a child, Buck instinctively knew the difference.

You are a VIP, a very important person so take care with self care. If not you, who? If not now, when?

Gran...I just want to say thank you for everything. I didn't realize how much you sacrificed.” “Children never do. Good Lord made it that way.