How to Get Your Parents To Stay Home

"Anger, anguish, and anxiety. This is what your emotional life may look like in the time of COVID-19," assistant professor Claudia Haase writes on Medium.

"Then you call your parents and realize — some of them are going out, visiting friends, and now they want to travel and see their grandchildren. Is there anything you can do?

In her piece, How to Talk to Your Parents so They Will Listen — and Stay at Home, Haase offers several strategies for talking with older adults and dealing with emotions during the current coronavirus pandemic. Haase, a life-span developmental psychologist who studies emotion and motivation across the life span at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy highlights three reasons why staying at home can be so difficult for older adults. She also offers strategies for talking to older people in your life and dealing with your own emotions. 

"You can only try to change someones’ behavior if you understand it," she writes. "As people age, their motivational and emotional systems get tweaked in powerful ways. Older adults are all too aware that their time on this earth is limited, and they may want to make the most of now. In normal times, older people benefit enormously from these emotional tweaks — so much, in fact, that older people tend to be happier than their younger counterparts. But these emotional tweaks can get in the way during a pandemic."

Read her full piece on Medium.