Larkin McPhee is a Peabody and Emmy award-winning director, producer and writer of documentary films, including CARING FOR MOM & DAD. Her films have covered topics ranging from personal finance to nuclear power to the illness of depression. McPhee's documentaries impart a deep knowledge of the subject matter and provide viewers with a blueprint for positive change, using meticulous research, outstanding characters and powerful story-telling.

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Dear Viewers,

Of all the topics I have covered in filmmaking, none have registered as strong of a response from friends and acquaintances as the subject of CARING FOR MOM & DAD. It is as if everyone's heart is beating to the same rhythm of concern, worry or exhaustion about how we are managing this difficult passage of life for those we love so dearly and who gave us life. My father is 90, my mother 86. They are divorced, and their children live far away. My father remarried, my mother lives alone. She refuses help.

Naturally my mother is a greater source of worry for her children, but realistically, all bets are off when your parents reach the twlight years of life. Fragility defines them and a steady undercurrent of anxiety defines most of us. It is hard to tread on my mother's yearning to be left alone with her garden and independence. She understands that some help now could ensure a safer existence and perhaps a longer life. But she resists our entreaties, and we live in fear of her falling or some other untoward event, that could thrust her and all of us into crisis mode.

Most Americans, like my mother, want to live and die in their own homes. The impulse is so strong that one elderly man clung to a volcanic mountaintop, as Atul Gawande describes in his latest book “Being Mortal,” —refusing to leave his home, even though a cauldron of seething lava was about to engulf him. In CARING FOR MOM & DAD, we turn our camera lens on caregivers and their parents, who mostly share this same impulse. We examine ways in which caregivers of all socioeconomic backgrounds can be better supported in their profoundly important role of caring for Mom and Dad. In America, family caregivers provide ninety percent of the assistance for free, often while they struggle to balance work and raising a family. More than half carry out medical tasks traditionally reserved for a nurse. Their burden is heavy.

The film includes innovative ideas, enlightened employers, and community-based solutions that offer real hope for family caregivers on the front lines. It also showcases the binding nature of family love. Seen through an economic prism, the ideas and solutions in the film suggest powerful policy considerations. As a result of working on this timely topic, I am certainly better informed about options for my parents, and I continue to keep tabs on my mother. One day she might even acquiesce to our offer to come live with us—in our home.

—Larkin McPhee