Abstract
My own living and working through normative family transitions of parent care (as both a professional gerontologist and an intergenerational family member) facilitated five important kinds of growth: (a) providing parent care with optimal integrity; (b) understanding, elaborating, and teaching life-cycle theory with increasing depth; (c) using this theory to enrich practice approaches to long-term care; (d) identifying valuable new research directions; and (e) creating a multidimensional professional life that furthers theoretical development and identifies practice principles that promote individual, familial, and societal experiences of a “good old age.” This reflective essay addresses these different kinds of growth, as they emerged from and contribute to the ever-developing gerontological domains of theory and practice.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 54-60 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Gerontologist |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by grants from the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station (MIN-55-035 and MIN-55-021), Helen Q. Kivnick Principal Investigator.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Erikson
- Life-cycle theory
- Person-centered care
- Practice
- Theory
- Vital involvement