How To Get a Stubborn Parent to Listen
How To! with Mike Pesca
Peach Fish Projects
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2020
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alan's 86-year-old dad will not stop driving—even after an incident where he drove off the road and totaled his car. Feeling guilty and worried, Alan has tried to convince his dad to hand over the keys, even enlisting the support of his father's doctor, but everything Alan does seems to backfire. In this episode of How To!, Saturday Night Live comedian Jim Breuer shares his own experience dealing with a curmudgeonly father as chronicled in the documentary More Than Me. Jim says to reach an aging parent who is set in their ways, don't try to replace them as the parent. Instead, realize they're facing their own mortality and give them a sense of control. Let your dad be a dad, then ask for some fatherly advice: "What would you do if you were me?"
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello how to listeners if you are listening to this it means you probably like our show and you should let other people know |
| 0:06.9 | We would so appreciate it if you would go to Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast and leave us a rating and a review and tell your friends to tune in. |
| 0:15.0 | Thanks. |
| 0:17.0 | So Joel, if you don't mind, could you read the tweet you sent a few weeks after the pandemic started? |
| 0:22.0 | Yeah, sure, let's see, it's... you sent a few weeks after the pandemic started? |
| 0:22.6 | Yeah, sure, let's see. |
| 0:24.4 | I, so yeah, I tweeted this on April 9th. |
| 0:27.6 | You think you've conveyed the seriousness of the situation |
| 0:31.6 | to your parents, and then you find out your father |
| 0:34.1 | went to a honey-baked ham for your mother who is planning to cook Easter dinner for your |
| 0:38.4 | grandmother and wash her hair. This is Joel Anderson, a staff writer at Slate and the host of season 3 of the podcast Slowburn. |
| 0:50.0 | And Joel was tweeting about his parents and the coronavirus. |
| 0:53.0 | Joel himself, he recently got infected, |
| 0:56.0 | and he thinks his parents aren't taking enough precautions in Houston where they live. |
| 1:00.0 | My mother was a nurse for many years. My dad was a medic in Vietnam. |
| 1:07.0 | So they have all the information, but I thought they still weren't quite as rigorous in adhering to social distancing as they should have given their elderly black people. |
| 1:19.0 | So I just I've been really been concerned about them and have been trying to stay on them ever since. |
| 1:23.9 | So like what are they doing? |
| 1:24.9 | Are they leaving the house? |
| 1:26.9 | Like how are they? |
| 1:27.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:28.9 | One night my mother wasn't answering her phone and so my aunt was on her way over there to check on her and I was like all right well hey |
... |
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