Here’s a loaded topic that’s hard to write about these days, yet may be important for real communication, especially when the person living with dementia is a woman, and the caregiver is some old guy. How important is “girl talk”?
Let’s skip over recent courtroom dramas of celebrities in “He said, She said” trials. The fictional opposite extreme is sci-fi telepathic communication, as exhibited in Sense8 on Netflix, which CareGivingOldGuy thought was very cool.
[Sense8, a pun for “sensate,” can be a sci-fi brutal thriller at times, by the same writers/directors of The Matrix. Lots of mind-bending and gender-bending moments, with stunning cross-cultural visuals around the world, and some bonobo-like moments, too.]
Gender role reversal may develop in caregiving, but changes in the long standing habit of using gendered pronouns might create confusion.
However, the concept of girl talk long preceded the Broadway song “Girl Talk,” sung by Tony Bennett. Singer Michael Feinstein, who does his own nice version, calls the clever lyrics “male chauvinistic.” The group TLC’s own hip-hop song “Girl Talk,” is totally different, about men’s shortcomings [ummm, yeah, that’s a euphemism!]; there is even a DJ who is called Girl Talk.
So girl talk has a place in pop culture. One website helps gentlemen “translate” such girl talk as “I’m fine!” But most of the time, girl talk refers to discussions between females about things that usually wouldn’t even interest men.
Deborah Tannen, a linguist, published her landmark book You Just Don’t Understand ! (1990) about the differences in US male and female communication styles. To oversimplify it, females have more “rapport-talk” while men have more “report-talk”. There are both fans and critics of the book.
Anecdote: when a daughter was planning her own wedding, even the CareGivingOldGuy could tell something was bothering the Mother of the Bride, not easily articulated. It took two female friends to decipher some wardrobe and ceremony issues, the kinds of details that most old guy Fathers of the Bride would never even think about (the FOTB is just there to smile and sign checks, right?)
There was a very insightful /resonant paper this year in The Gerontologist about stressors for caregivers and the person with young onset dementia themselves. The authors discuss communication, changing roles and relationships especially for spousal caregivers (dyads), AND they mention, in an example from one caregiver, the importance of “girl time!”
The article is a combination of review and an interview study of 23 people living with dementia, and their caregivers. Importantly, they tabulate “adaptive coping strategies,” ranging from avoidance (not that helpful), to planning discussions (more helpful), to using humor as a buffer.
A PubMed search doesn’t reveal anything easily found about girl talk as a kind of comfort or therapy. But there was a paper this year about using artificial intelligence robots… could Rosey the Robot from the Jetsons help?
Every caregiver learns quickly that no one person can do it all. CareGivingOldGuy owns up to having a lot of blind spots, even as the daily care gets done. Since the trajectory of these conditions worsens communication, one worries about missing something, and has to acknowledge that maybe a girl talk listener and confidante might sometimes be a better fit.
Adriaen van Ostade, “Two Old Women Talking,” Haarlem, ~1654, CC0 Rijksmuseum
