title: Living Gerontology: Providing Long-Distance, Long-term Care.
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.
authors.affiliation: Professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. hkivnick@umn.edu.
authors.forename: Helen Q
authors.initials: HQ
authors.lastname: Kivnick
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging; D017028:Caregivers / Q000523:psychology*; D003704:Dementia / Q000451:nursing; D005260:Female; D016852:Housing for the Elderly; D006801:Humans; D008134:Long-Term Care; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D010290:Parents; D018802:Patient-Centered Care; D011368:Professional-Family Relations
keywords: Erikson; Life-cycle theory; Person-centered care; Practice; Theory; Vital involvement