Communication is skill and art.
Skills are specific types of verbal and nonverbal actions that help you get the results you want, including cooperation, joint decision making, and finding solutions to difficult issues. The art part is taking the skills and figuring out how to apply the skills to a specific situation. Your job as a caregiver is to decide what to use and how to use it. When you are talking with aging parents and have some concern about how the communication may go, you are most likely talking about an important topic or an emotionally loaded topic. Emotionally loaded topics are almost anything that leads to strong emotions being experienced and communicated.