Supporting Your Elderly Parents: Key Elements to Consider
As our parents get older, it’s natural for something of a role reversal to occur. They’ve looked after us, and then suddenly, they need us to do the same for them.
This certainly isn’t the case for all elderly people as many live totally independently for virtually their entire lives, but most of the time, supporting your parents through their senior years is required. This can come as a shock to a lot of people, and the process can range from relatively simple to extremely burdensome.
Whatever situation you and your parents face, there are always ways of making the process go more smoothly. In this article, you’ll learn of the key considerations to keep in mind as you embark on this journey together.
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The Importance of Prioritizing Physical Health
The first issues an elderly person is most likely to encounter are those involving physical health. Whether it be chronic conditions like arthritis that set in, or simply the wear and tear of bones, muscles, and ligaments, it’s important for your parents to get assessed and diagnosed so that you can know how best to help them with the physical elements of their lives that have become difficult. Here are some factors to bear in mind:
Encouraging Regular Health Checkups
Regular health checkups are essential to both diagnose and keep an eye on any developing health conditions. Early detection is important, so work with your parents to schedule blood tests, screenings, and physical therapies to mitigate the problems as much as possible.
Occupational Therapy
If possible, have an occupational therapist assess their home to determine physical changes that should be made to best support them. This could be as simple as installing handrails in a bathroom to having a stair lift added. The more ways you can make their independent life easier, the better for both them and you.
Support Healthy Eating
There’s a lot of truth to the sentiment ‘you are what you eat’. Nutrition has a direct carry-over to many of the physical illnesses people face, and a healthy diet is key for preventing the biggest killers such as heart disease, cancer, and even dementia. It’s also common that as people get older, they start to neglect their diet more, making early intervention even more important.
If possible, schedule a consultation with a dietitian to go through things properly. If you can’t, there’s plenty of quality information online about how to properly construct a good diet.
Promote Physical Activity
We all know that exercise is critically important for optimal health, and as we get older, the importance only increases. Elderly people face numerous health issues like arthritis, sarcopenia (muscle wasting/atrophy), and osteoporosis, and regular physical exercises work to strengthen each of those elements.
A mixture of cardiovascular exercise (aerobics such as running, cycling, and so on) for heart and respiratory health and strength/resistance training (with machines and free weights at a gym or at home) to build muscle and support bone mineral density, offers the best approach to maintain your parent’s physical functioning for as long as possible.
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On Mental Well-Being
In many ways, a persons mental well-being is just as important as their physical well-being. Loneliness amongst elderly populations is endemic in Western society, and this has been shown to have a direct carry-over to conditions like dementia.
More than any other group, it’s extremely important for elderly individuals to maintain strong social connections. Regularly seeing you and the rest of their family is key, but so are friendships: encourage your parents to see their friends or attend activities to meet new people – work with them to find new clubs they could join or events they could go to.
They could also consider senior living. These sorts of residential facilities are a far cry from traditional care home environments, and instead create a relaxing, fun, livable environment for otherwise lonely elderly people to socialize and live their life with more vigor. In this sense, they can be far more preferable than mostly being alone in their house, and with the most important elements of their personal care taken into close consideration, these centers can provide the full package.
Wrapping Up
Supporting your parents through old age doesn’t necessarily have to represent the immense burden you envisage. Everyone’s situation is different, of course, but through planning ahead and taking a holistic approach, there are always things you can do to shift the focus of this period towards being life-giving rather than a slow decline.
