Elderly Care Tips: Helping Friends and Family Understand Alzheimer’s Disease
Elderly Care Plantation FL
Friends and family can be a tremendous source of support, encouragement, and help when you are on an elderly care journey with a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. In order to get the most benefit from these people’s involvement, however, it is essential that they have as much understanding of the condition and its role in your parent’s life as possible. Giving them as much information as they can and helping them to understand as well as possible will empower them to be the most valuable addition to your care efforts they can.
Use these tips to help you help friends and family understand Alzheimer’s disease in your aging parent:
• Host a meeting. Getting everyone who you think should know about the diagnosis and its impact together to talk about it at the same time. This will make it so that you only have to share the same information once and will prevent any one person from feeling isolated or singled out. Talking about the situation together also enables everyone to share, learn, and ask questions that will benefit everyone. The exception to this one meeting concept is if you need to talk to children. You will need to take a different approach with children than you do adults, and will likely want to plan a different time to talk with them.
• Emphasize fact, not assumption. Each person who comes into this conversation will have assumptions about what Alzheimer’s is, how it impacts a person, and what can be done about it. Make sure that you emphasize the actual situation and the facts regarding your parent’s condition. Dispelling rumors and making sure that each person is clear on the real situation can help to eliminate the possibility of awkward or even dangerous care mistakes.
• Give details. Respecting your loved one as much as possible, give details about her condition. This should be how you came to bring her to the doctor, what the doctor said about her current condition, and any prognosis information that you may have. These details can help your friends and family wrap their minds around what is really going on so that they can better determine their future role in her care.
• Encourage their involvement. Your friends’ and family’s involvement in your elderly care efforts for your parent is not just about making things easy for you. While relieving your stress and enabling you to continue taking care of yourself and your other obligations in life is a positive aspect of this, it is not the only one. Encourage their involvement from the perspective that they are doing something meaningful to help your parent. Let them know that the social interaction and support from each person will nurture your parent’s mind and help her to maintain her cognitive functioning and memory skills for as long as possible. This also helps to ease their burden if they do not think that they are qualified or capable of handling many tasks. Knowing that something as simple as stopping by for a visit can make a difference will help them to be more active and involved.
