Five Tips to Protect Your Senior’s Dignity While Offering Help
Home Care Assistance in Auburn
Part of the difficulty of aging is that sometimes your senior needs assistance, but she won’t necessarily want it. There’s a lot about having help that can bruise a senior’s dignity. When you’re doing the best you can to provide help that protects your elderly family member’s dignity and independence, that’s going to help her accept that assistance.
Ask What She Needs and What She Wants
When you want to take care of your elderly family member, it’s so easy to just step in and do, rather than looking first at how that’s going to feel to her. Stop and remember to ask your senior what she wants and needs. Even if you’re sure what help you can provide to her, let her have a say in what is going on.
Demonstrate How Help Protects Her Independence
It isn’t always readily apparent to seniors how home care assistance and help from a family caregiver is beneficial. In fact, it can look at first blush as if you’re taking independence away from her instead of trying to help her. The reality is that when your elderly family member accepts assistance from you and other caregivers, she’s better able to care for herself in the ways that she still can. Seeing that for herself may be necessary.
Offer as Much Choice as You Possibly Can
The more choices your senior has, the more she’s going to feel in control of what is happening in her life. Overwhelming her with choice can be just as detrimental as offering her no choice at all. What you’re doing by offering help from home care assistance is supporting your elderly family member in being as independent as possible.
Give Your Senior Space When She Needs It
Your senior may find that she needs her space periodically. Even when you’re doing everything right and ensuring that you’re not embarrassing her with your help. It can still feel suffocating for her. That’s much more normal than many people realize. Make sure that you’re putting solutions in place. For instance, bringing in elder care providers for respite care. It will give your elderly family member some time to decompress.
Know When it’s Time for You to Back Off, Too
Something else to remember is that there will be times as a family caregiver when you need your own time and space. That’s going to help you continue to be there for your elderly family member as much as you want. Making respite time a regular part of your weekly routine will pay off for both you and your senior.
Everything with caregiving is a delicate balance. When you want to take the best care possible of your senior and still allow her to be an individual. That means you’re going to have to pay attention to details that are easy to overlook at times.
If you or an aging loved one are considering hiring Home Care Assistance in Sacramento, CA, talk to the caring staff at Partners in Care today. Serving El Dorado, Nevada, Yuba, Sutter, Sacramento, Placer, Butte, Glenn, Yolo, & Colusa Counties!
Call us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! (530) 268-7423
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