Barbara Sparacino is a triple board-certified physician in adult and geriatric psychiatry and addiction medicine, and the founder of The Aging Parent Coach. With over fifteen years of clinical experience, she empowers adult children to navigate the emotional, legal, and caregiving complexities that arise when supporting aging parents. Her expert insights have been featured by major outlets, including NBC, Fox News, CBS, Apple News+, Style, Care.com, and Next Avenue.
Through her signature program, The Aging Parent Plan, Dr. Sparacino helps families make confident, values-based decisions about care while preserving their own mental and emotional well-being. She continues to practice psychiatry and teach through her work with the University of Miami and the Veterans Health Administration, advocating for a compassionate, evidence-informed approach to aging and mental health.
Follow her on Instagram, TikTok, or visit The Aging Parent Coach to learn more.
We are exquisitely good at managing the aging emergency and strikingly bad at preventing it. That is a system design choice, not a clinical inevitability.
Every physician who cares for older adults knows the pattern. A patient we have seen for years, stable, independent, managing, arrives one day transformed by a single event: a fall, a hospitalization, a stroke, an acute delirium. And in the seventy-two hours that follow, a family …
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The advance care planning conversation nobody starts
There’s a moment that happens in almost every family caring for an aging parent. It usually begins the same way. Someone leans in, frustrated, exhausted, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, and says, “My family is crazy.”
As a geriatric psychiatrist, I hear this often. What’s interesting is that everyone says it. Every sibling group thinks the others are unreasonable. Every adult child believes they’re the only one who sees things clearly. Every …
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The family caregiving truth nobody wants to admit
She did not begin with the abuse; she began with sleep.
“I do not know why the news is bothering me so much,” she said. “I cannot turn it off. I feel on edge all the time.”
She was in her late 50s, successful, articulate, and with no prior trauma history documented in her chart. She insisted she was not “overreacting,” just “sensitive to injustice.” At the time, headlines were saturated with …
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Trauma reactivation: Why news headlines trigger past abuse
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I love the cooking, the noise, the parade, the extra side dishes no one really has room for. Every year I tell my parents I want to “go bigger”: more food, more people, more traditions. And every year, my mother looks at me with a mix of love and exasperation and says some version of, “Can we please do a little less this year? My …
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Aging parents and Thanksgiving: a gentle check-in
I can sit with patients and families and talk about hospice, dementia, or end-of-life care without hesitation. Years of training as a physician and geriatric psychiatrist have prepared me for those conversations. But when my own parent needed care, all that training suddenly felt useless.
Medical knowledge didn’t shield me from fear or guilt. It didn’t stop the second-guessing that came with every decision. It didn’t help me navigate the family …
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Why caring for a parent is hard for doctors
