Grace Lebow

Grace Lebow and Barbara Kane are both clinical social workers. In 1982 they established Aging Network Services (http://www.agingnets.com), a social work care management and counseling agency dedicated to helping older people and their families. Grace is now co-director emerita; Barbara remains as director. It did not take long for us to recognize that well over half the adult children who came to see us for counseling were in a state of stress over their “difficult parents.” They used the word “difficult,” not so much because of the physical burden of caring for parents in a state of decline, but because of the emotional drain of trying to help parents who were hard to help. In many instances the adult child had distanced himself from his parents either geographically or emotionally. But now that the parent was suffering from the ravages of old age, the child could no longer escape. In the intervening years we have helped thousands of such clients with their difficult parents. Grace also gained the perspective of a family of a difficult parent when she and her husband Irwin, an engineer/physicist who had written several technical books, took care of his mother in her later years. Indeed it was this experience that gave us the idea of writing a book that would share our experience with a much larger group of people. We tried out our ideas on professional colleagues as well as on laymen and received the universally enthusiastic response that a book like this was sorely needed. Grace is a graduate of Boston School of Occupational Therapy, Tufts University and a 1972 graduate of Simmons College School of Social Work. Barbara is a graduate of Boston University School of Social Work and has degree in Public Health from Pittsburg University.