Creating Quality Time with Your Aging Parent
As the caregiver for your aging parent, you must try to balance taking care of them (personal care, household, finances), your own family, work and social demands.
We often see adult children caregivers completely stressed out by their multiple life demands. More importantly, many adult children caregivers realize they are not spending any quality of time with their aging parent.
Be the kid again, not the caregiver
We recently had a client, call her Lauren, who was the main caregiver for her mom who had end-stage dementia. Her dad tried to help but had his own health issues. Lauren had to do a significant level of personal care for her mom (very taxing), keep up with housework, manage their finances, and take her to doctor’s appointment all while trying to balance her own life’s demands. She was not only exhausted but also, she realized she wasn’t spending any quality time with her mom at end-of-life.
Benefits of Home provided a consistent, reliable, compassionate caregiver to manage her personal care, meals and household issues. Lauren was then able to come in and spend quality time with her mom, reading the Bible, looking at old pictures and connecting without the stress of caregiving.
You want your kids to bathe you?
Another client is mainly cared for by his two loving daughters. He has moderate dementia and most recently, is not getting out of bed. He is refusing personal care support from his daughters which has escalated to significant confrontations.
It is very common for dementia clients to refuse care from spouses or children. You can only imagine how uncomfortable this is for your aging parent.
With trained dementia caregivers, Benefits of Home was able to get their father to take a shower and complete proper personal care on an ongoing basis. We engaged him with a specific Dementia Care Plan focused on meaningful activities he likes to do so he no longer stays in bed all day. The daughters now spend quality, enjoyable time with their father like playing card games, doing puzzles and taking walks.