Liz Taylor of the Seattle Times, gives her opinion about the PBS Special Caring for Your Parents.

She feels that PBS missed a great opportunity:

There were so many missed opportunities to educate the audience, to show us better ways of doing this, to get us to think about these things ahead of time so we don’t have to be as miserable as the people portrayed.

Though I didn’t get to catch the special (see: other end of sandwich), she hit the nail on the head for me about some of the other portrayals and information about aging parents:

Tragically, this mistreatment of aging in the media is common. Producers are finally awakening to the fact that more of us are growing older, but they’re turning the experience into a soap opera. And they’re characterizing aging as a hysterical, inevitable and thankless struggle.

Though there are things that are very difficult, facing your aging parents doesn’t have to be chock full of emotion every time you see them.

I try to cover a fair about of things here that have to do with aging parents that aren’t maudlin and hysterics. I mean, afterall if I could only talk about the emotion-fueled changes in the parent child relationship when the parent gets older, you would have totally missed how my dad is trying to kill me with his cell phone.

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