Caregiving in America

When someone you love needs you, everything changes.

It can begin with a phone call, a diagnosis, a fall, a hospital stay, a change in memory or mobility, or the quiet realization that your mother, your father, or your husband or wife can no longer manage alone. Suddenly you are making decisions you never expected to face, usually without training, without warning, and without a clear idea of what comes next.

Most people in that position never set out to become a caregiver. They were simply the one who answered the phone.

A Practical Roadmap for Families

Caregiving in America is a comprehensive, practical guide for spouses, adult children, relatives, friends, neighbors and anyone who has become responsible for the care and well-being of someone they love. It is written for families rather than for clinicians, and its purpose is to help you understand your options, ask better questions, advocate more effectively, prepare for the hard decisions, and move forward with more confidence and less fear.

What You Will Find Inside

• Navigating doctors, hospitals, rehabilitation, home care, assisted living and nursing homes
• Understanding Medicare, Medicaid, long-term care insurance and veterans' benefits
• Supporting someone living with Alzheimer's disease, dementia or another complex condition
• Helping an aging parent stay safely at home for as long as possible
• Powers of attorney, advance directives, guardianship and legal planning
• The financial realities of care, and how families actually pay for it
• Caregiver burnout, compassion fatigue, respite and mental health
• Difficult family dynamics, long-distance caregiving and changing care needs
• Hospice, end-of-life planning, grief, transitions and life after caregiving

One Book Instead of Ten

At more than 700 pages, Caregiving in America was built to be kept rather than read once and shelved. Alongside the guidance you will find worksheets, assessments, checklists, planning tools, the questions worth asking, an expanded glossary, and resource directories covering national organizations and all fifty states, so that when circumstances change the next answer is in the same book as the last one.

Because caregiving is rarely one decision. It is hundreds of decisions made over months or years, usually while you are tired, worried and trying to do right by someone you love.

Wherever You Are in the Journey

Whether you are already caring for someone, beginning to see that help will soon be needed, or trying to prepare before a crisis makes the choice for you, this book gives you practical information, real resources and a clearer path forward.

Lance A. Slatton is an award-winning author and senior care professional known as "The Senior Care Influencer," host of All Home Care Matters and President of AlzAuthors. He cared for his own father for nearly three years. This is the book he wishes his family had been handed at the start.

You may never have expected to become a caregiver. But you do not have to face every decision alone.