A nightmare scenario makes a difficult family conversation even harder as children weigh their parents’ wishes to age in place
By Clare Ansberry, The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2026
The Nancy Guthrie case, while a nightmare for one high-profile family, is striking a personal chord with millions of Americans.
We all have aging relatives or friends and worry about something happening to them. Many live alone, hundreds of miles away. They may have lots of friends, golf five times a week, but are still 80 or 90 and likely to have chronic health conditions. What if they fall, get in an accident, have a stroke, get scammed? The Guthrie case adds another, more horrific scenario.
Older adults, too, are concerned, in a broader sense. The unimaginable series of events—the middle-of-the-night kidnapping of an 84-year-old woman—shows that awful things can happen. The billboards on Texas highways read “Missing Person” with her age and photo.
All this highlights what many seniors and their concerned children know: Even if they are relatively healthy and active, they are vulnerable too.
Yet most older adults want to live in their own home, whether alone or not. They value their independence. Their kids, on the other hand, especially as their parents grow older, value safety. The tension between kids and their parents has always been there, but scary things like the Guthrie case exacerbate it.
“It brings to light what scares us most about aging: that we are reaching a vulnerable stage,” says Dr. Louise Aronson, a geriatrician and author.
This past week, while getting her haircut, Aronson said her stylist, who is about 60, began talking about the Guthrie case.
The stylist said she always thought the thing to fear most about aging was dementia. Now she fears being abducted. Abductions are rare, but in the stylist’s mind, they are no longer unimaginable.
Feeding the fear: Many older adults live alone.
More than 16 million people age 65 and older in the U.S. live alone. That represents 28% of that age group, almost triple the share in 1950. Many are women.
Among the reasons for living alone: increased longevity, higher divorce rates among older adults and children who are more scattered than previous generations. And the older you get, the more likely you are to live alone: More than half of households with someone 75 and older consist of only one person.
Living alone carries risks. Older adults on their own tend to have more accidents and neglect their health. Those who are lonely are often targeted by scammers, who have become more sophisticated. For example, some use artificial intelligence to create believable audio and videos of relatives to extract funds.
Tina Sadarangani is in the sandwich generation, with kids at home and aging relatives. She is also a geriatric nurse practitioner and has many older patients who want to remain in their house.
“People want to preserve their independence as long as possible. They think, this can’t happen to me,” she says. “That fact that there are people in the world who would attack an older vulnerable person is really jarring.”
She wants people to stay at home as long as possible, but that may mean making modifications and agreeing to cameras and sensors, even if they don’t like them. “As we age we have to understand our vulnerabilities and stop trying to ignore them,” she says.
It’s a fine line.
On a recent evening, after finishing their bocce game, Julie Schoen talked with friends about Nancy Guthrie. The conversation moved from particular details of the case into artificial intelligence, tracking devices and Oura rings. Her friends have parents in their late 80s and 90s, some living alone, and worry about them.
A friend’s mother was scammed out of $10,000. She called Schoen, past director of the National Center on Elder Abuse, for advice. The money was recovered.
“They are at the crossroads, self-determination versus safety. When can you cross the line and take over?” she says.
One of the most unsettling things about the Guthrie case is that it adds another layer of uncertainty about our ability to control our lives. Things you never imagined or thought possible happen.
But the solution isn’t having older parents leave their homes where they spent decades of their lives, and go live with someone else, says Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity.
“They try to talk older parents into moving and their parents want to live where they want to live.” Therein lies the tension.
Carstensen knows. Her 97-year-old dad lived alone in a two-story house on the East Coast. He had balance issues and a heart condition.
“I would wake up and hope to have an email,” she says. If not, she would call. He refused to have sensors installed throughout his home. But he did agree to put one on his refrigerator and one in his office. A biophysicist, that was where he spent his days writing papers. She checked those sensors every morning.
Her dad, she says, would tell her that if he fell in the kitchen, hit his head and died two days later, “it wouldn’t be the worst way to go.” That is exactly what happened.
Carstensen was with him, as was her brother, when her dad died at home. While devastating at the time, Carstensen says she understands his desires and respects them. “He got his wish in that sense” she says. “He lived life on his own terms.”
Weighing parents’ wishes against children’s worries is always fraught, and the Guthrie case adds to the stress. But it isn’t likely to be the deciding factor in where and how older parents live.
“There is an internal struggle about how to balance someone’s autonomy and safety,” says Liz O’Donnell, the Boston-based founder of Working Daughter, an online community of caregivers. “The Nancy Guthrie case has triggered some of those feelings in the community, but overall our community is viewing this as a unique situation.”
“We worry about falls and scams, not kidnappings,” she says.
Source: Clare Ansberry, The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2026
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