Senior Care: Keeping an elderly parent with dementia active

Senior Care: Keeping an elderly parent with dementia active

paying for parents to stay at homeIt’s important to keep an elderly parent with dementia active to benefit their overall health and well-being. This being the case, it’s the duty of the caregivers to put in the effort to find activities that are stimulating. Perhaps the biggest challenge is finding things to do that are fun for both you and your parent with dementia.

AgingCare.com shares some general guidelines on how to best approach this:

Creating meaningful activities

  • Design activities that safely involve your parent’s interests. For example, if they enjoy games, have a regular game night. The severity of the dementia can make the difficultly and length of these activities vary.
  • If your parent lacks the physical or cognitive capability, make the necessary adjustments to allow them to participate in their favorite activities. Maybe taking them out to bingo is no longer an option, but playing bingo or other games in the home is.
  • Make activities meaningful is important — this contributes to your parent’s overall health, even if they don’t necessarily remember every moment of the experience.

Keeping up with old routines

  • People are creatures of habit — and routines are important for people with dementia as it gives them a sense of purpose. Activities that make your parent feel needed and useful can add greatly to their overall happiness. Allowing them to keep up with old routines like cooking and cleaning — even to a small degree — helps them hold on to their sense of independence.

Exercise

  • Taking your parent with dementia on daily walks or other forms of light activity, as AgingCare.com states, can reduce agitation and wandering, which can be triggered by lack of exercise.

Social interaction

  • Just the same as people are creatures of habit, so to are they pack animals. This is why social interaction fills a basic need within us all. Sadly, dementia leads far too many people to lives of isolation. Involving your parent in everyday tasks, like going to the store, will be something they enjoy and appreciate time and again.

Physicians Choice Private Duty can help

Physicians Choice Private Duty — currently serving Omaha, Eastern Nebraska and Western Iowa provides seniors and their families a complete understanding of the options available for those with dementia and related conditions like Alzheimer’s.

All Physicians Choice Private Duty services are directed by registered nurses or social workers with no long-term contracts.

Contact us today with your senior care needs.

“Physicians Choice Private Duty solves the problems families face in finding home health care providers they can trust. Providers who will focus on strategies that keep parents in their homes. To learn more about our health care services, visit https://private-duty.pchhc.com/services/.