Mom Always Liked You Best: A Guide for Resolving Family Feuds, Inheritance Battles & Eldercare Crises

This book is a practical guide for the millions of Americans currently struggling with adult family conflict. It is designed to give you the information and tools you need right now to achieve those mutual agreements that seem so elusive. Is your family trying to manage an ongoing dispute around eldercare, family property, estate planning, or inheritance issues? Is your family conflict causing distress for your elderly parent? Do you love your siblings but have no idea how to get them to communicate and make decisions? If your family is experiencing these or any other all too common adult family challenges, this guide is for you. The authors have helped many such families who are in conflict around elder transitions and associated issues. They are "thought leaders" in the field of elder mediation and also bring decades of experience in the areas of education, finance, healthcare, social work, and estate settlement, as well as their own family experiences. By reading this step-by-step guide and practicing the techniques that they lay out for you, you will learn skills used by professionals. You will learn tools to help you stop having those circular arguments that go on interminably and get you nowhere. Easy-to-read and filled with engaging examples, this guide can help you think like a mediator in order to become a better decision-maker, a more mindful negotiator, and a more effective communicator. It can help you to lead your own family members toward consensus around some of the most important decisions you will ever face together.

Arline Kardasis, Rikk Larsen, Crystal Thorpe, and Blair Trippe are mediators and co-founders of Elder Decisions, a division of Agreement Resources, LLC, a nationally recognized mediation, training, and consulting firm specializing in helping families resolve disputes around eldercare, property sharing, inheritance matters, and other adult family conflicts.