There’s a certain expediency to taking complete control over everything your senior needs, but is that really the best option for your senior? It probably isn’t in her best interests. A better option is to keep your senior involved and engaged in her own care for as long as possible.

Establish Eye Contact During Care Activities

As you’re helping your senior with specific tasks, make sure you’re establishing eye contact first. This helps quite a bit because you’ve got her attention and you’re about to work together on whatever needs to happen next. It’s also helpful if what you need is for your elderly family member to follow along with an activity you’re modeling or miming for her. When you know you’ve got her attention, the whole process is a lot easier.

Let Her Know What’s about to Happen

Once you’ve got her attention, you need to let your elderly family member know what you’re about to do. It can be disconcerting for someone to just start doing something to her or around her and for her to be unaware of what’s going on. You might find that she’s more resistant when you haven’t given her a heads up about what’s happening next, for example.

Make Sure You’re not Taking Over

Something else to remember is that it’s important you’re not just taking over tasks and activities for your elderly family member. You might think it’s better for you to handle certain tasks because you can do those things faster or you might do them more accurately. But when you take over tasks your senior can still do, that may cause her to start to lose that skill. Demonstrating for her is one thing. Taking over completely is another.

Work out a Way to Let Her Ask for Help

You and your elderly family member might want to agree to a system where she asks you for help when she needs it and you trust that she’ll do so. This allows her to try things on her own and yet know that you’re there for support when needed. This can be hard to do, though. Working with elderly care providers can help you to learn how to sit back a bit and what it looks like when you do need to step in.

It’s important on both an emotional level and a practical level for your senior to be as involved as possible in her own care.

If you or an aging loved one is considering elderly care in Minnetonka, MN, and the surrounding areas, please contact the friendly staff at CareBuilders at Home Minnesota. Call today 612-260-2273.