There are many reasons why you may choose to care for your aging parents in their home. Keeping aging parents at home is a wonderful thing to do, as long as the situation is safe for everyone involved. If you are caring for an older adult at home, pacing yourself and obtaining assistance can go a long way. To help you, we are talking about 5 tips to keep aging parents at home.
Keep Aging Parents At Home With These 5 Tips:
1. Be realistic about how much care is needed.
When you are overwhelmed with a long list of caregiving to-dos, you are more focused on individual tasks rather than the larger picture. To help combat this stress, take a step back and determine how much care your parent(s) needs. First, make a list of the daily, weekly, and monthly care tasks to help you understand how much help is needed. An easy way to do this is by leaving a notepad out and making a quick note every time you or someone else helps your senior with something. After a week or so, you will have a much better idea of what your aging parent needs to help with, and at what times of the day. Moving forward, you will understand the types of care your aging parent truly needs to keep them at home.
2. Be honest with yourself and others about how much you can provide.
Taking care of your aging parents can lead to burnout or a serious health condition–leaving you unable to take care of anyone else. When you are evaluating your parents’ needs, be realistic about how much you really can provide for them without harming your health. Be proactive when it comes to caregiving by finding other ways to get help. This way, you will be able to keep up with both your health and caregiving.
3. Ask for professional help with caregiving.
The best way to be proactive about keeping your aging parents at home is to get help. Even though it may seem like finding caregiving takes too much time and effort, this is an investment that will pay off in the future! Luckily, Sunny Days makes this process easy. We are devoted to providing high-quality and affordable in-home care services to all of our clients. With our individualized matching process, we assess our client’s needs and preferences instead of simply filling the vacancy with whoever is available. Our goal is to always understand our seniors’ needs to the best of our ability.
4. Share the caregiving responsibility with family.
Similar to gaining help with caregiving, you will want to share some of the responsibility when it comes to taking care of aging parents. Ask siblings or close relatives if they would take on their share of responsibility. This will give you an opportunity for some much-needed rest. Getting help from family members is different for everyone. For one person, it could be moving mom to the brother’s house for a year. For another person, it could be taking turns living with dad for a month or two at a time. If you have family willing to help, be creative and flexible. It may not be the ideal situation, but any help will lessen your responsibility for you.
5. Keeping aging parents at home can reduce financial pressure.
Finally, our last tip to help keep aging parents at home is to reduce financial pressure as much as possible. Caring for an older adult can place a significant financial burden on your family, and reducing caregiving costs as much as possible helps. At Sunny Days, we have several options available to you when it comes to in-home care payments. Any of our staff members would be more than willing to help you understand these payment options!
Caring for an aging parent can be a daunting task, but you are not in it alone! Be sure to keep these tips in mind, and you will be on the right track to providing the best care possible for your loved one. This will save you, and your aging parent safe, happy, and healthy! With over 10 years of service and 500+ caregivers, Sunny Days In-Home Care is here for you to get started with individualized, in-home care. Contact us today!