How to Care for Aging Parents

During your childhood years, you looked to your parents for all your needs. Your parents may be fit and healthy now, but at some point, they may struggle with ill health and look to you to be their primary caregiver. The following steps can ease the struggle of providing the respect, dignity and support system your parents need and deserve as you take on the role of caregiver.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

1. Research what kind of care your parents might need as they age. Healthy seniors still capable of maintaining most of the responsibility for themselves provide more easily-accessible options for you in helping them. Parents incapable of such care, however, will require a more permanent and hands-on approach.
2. Help them apply for eligibility to rent or buy an apartment from a retirement community that offers assistance, as needed, as your first option. These facilities still enable them to live as independently as they wish, but allow them to seek help quite easily (on the premises) should they need it.
3. Give yourself and your parents another option by considering using long-term care insurance. Insurance like this will assist in the cost of nursing homes as well as in-house nursing or elderly assistance.
4. Maintain your parents' home and allow them to continue living there as long as they are able. You may want to update the house to allow for their changing needs. Install safety features and new personal amenities in the house. Ideally, bathrooms should have grab bars around the toilet and bathtub/shower. Railings in all hallways and staircases are also a must.
5. Consider the use of a personal emergency response system while they are alone to protect your parents quickly and professionally in the event you cannot reach them.
6. Contact any local senior service groups for help locating one of a number of agencies offering to help care for aging parents. There are many which will match your and your parents' needs, offering minimal help early on, then changing to more hands-on, involved help as their health issues change.
7. Enroll in adult day care as a convenient way to provide care for your parent as well as offering them the chance to socialize with persons their own age.

Tips & Warnings

• Calculate the cost of care at any independent living, nursing or convalescent home to see if you come up short or don't qualify for insurance. If this is the case, consider moving your parent into your own home and providing the care yourself.