Encouraging Elderly Relatives To Better Look After Themselves
How can I help my elderly relatives to look after themselves? If you’ve asked yourself this, you’re not alone. Most of us worry about our senior family members.
We want to give them the right advice without patronizing them. After all, they’re likely far wiser and more experienced than we are.
Luckily, this is easy to achieve – as long as you know how. Follow our top three tips to encourage your older relatives to stay healthy.
Underline The Benefits
Healthy living can reap huge benefits – but you and your elderly relative probably know this already. A clear fact usually isn’t enough to help us stick to a lifestyle change, however good it may be for us.
A lot of the time, we need to constantly remind ourselves of why we’ve chosen to become healthier. So, why should it be any different for your senior relative?
Why not explore the reasons for eating well, exercising and generally looking after oneself with them? You’ll find that these spans improved physical and mental wellbeing, among various other advantages.
Once you’ve done this, you could both create motivational artwork – from post-it notes to posters – to place around the house and apartment.
This may just help them to sustain their commitment to healthy living.
Suggest Useful Equipment
Almost everybody enjoys independence – and so, most likely, will your senior relative.
Elderly people are often, and wrongly, associated with care homes and dependency. Many are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.
To avoid this stereotype, some are reluctant to ask for help – even though they may really need it.
If this applies to your own family member, don’t worry. Suggest assistive equipment, and they’ll be able to organize mobility solutions for themselves.
In turn, they can retain their sense of independence. If they’re not confident with making this kind of investment themselves, you also have the option to peruse and order items together.
This could be a useful way of encouraging your relative to look after themselves properly.
The right equipment could enable them to stay healthier for longer.
Exercise Together
What do you and your relative do when you meet up? Could it potentially involve exercise? If so, why don’t you incorporate healthy activity into your meetings?
This will give you the opportunity to catch up on their wellbeing. If you attend a yoga session, for example, they’ll have to declare any physical pains or ailments at the start of the class.
This could be especially helpful if they’re typically unwilling to share this information with you and the rest of your family.
And, of course, it may be more motivational to exercise as a team than individually – particularly for your elderly relatives, who’re likely to find it more strenuous than you.
It could further incentivize them to stay fit and healthy.
Your elderly relatives are no doubt important to you. So, it’s unsurprisingly that you should want to remain fit and healthy for as long as possible. With these tips, you can encourage them to do just that.
