How to Say It to Seniors Quotes

“the behavior we see as “diminished” in elderly parents, clients, and friends actually exists to do a very specific developmental job.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“Age is an opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“When our society lost this communal network, many aspects of our culture died, including the fact that we lost contact with older family members who could give us perspective on our lives. Without that perspective, we’ve become overscheduled, hyperstimulated, and culturally grumpy. We are so burdened by the pace of our lives that when we must interact with older people who cannot keep up, we run out of patience trying to fit them into our schedules. We have forgotten—or never learned—how to value our senior adults’ advice. As they begin to slow down, we push them aside so they don’t impede our progress. While we may accomplish a lot every day, we don’t necessarily feel good about our achievements because no one is there to tell us about the longer-term implications of choices we make. Many of us assume some things about senior adults that aren’t true, and then can’t understand why we aren’t getting along better with this aging population.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“When we start to realize that we’re not going to be here forever, we become aware that it’s not clear what it meant to be here at all.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“propel them backward, not forward, to reflect on what their lives have meant—to themselves, their loved ones, and the world at large.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“If we don’t resolve the key issues at each stage, we may get stuck and be considered immature by our peers.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“Most people assume that getting old is just more of the same. Aging is seen as being an adult, just older. This is what the son saw when he looked at his parents: older versions of the people they had always been. Somehow in the aging process they had become less effective at organizing and managing their daily lives. His job was to help them overcome these deficiencies so they could stay on task. He needed to keep them focused and help them get things done. It annoyed him that his parents seemed unaware of how far they had fallen off the pace. What about a simple written test did the old man not understand? Why did preparing for this test have to be so complicated an issue between them?”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“Seniors in turn don’t benefit from our ability to help them with their end-of-life tasks. They become developmental orphans, and their search for legacy, which must be helped along by caring younger adults, doesn’t take place.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“we need to become advocates for the older generation. One of the primary tasks that engage the elderly is the search for a legacy by which they’ll be remembered. Every day, whether our elders speak of it or not, they are reexamining events in their lives with the enhanced perspective of age. It is an all-consuming task, one that does not come naturally to us for two reasons: first, because for most of our lives we’ve been obsessively moving forward, second, because of what Mary Pipher, in her book Another Country, calls the loss of the communal society that once nurtured this process.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders