Senior Care Tips: Helping Your Parents Adjust After Downsizing
August 4, 2015
Senior Care in San Jose CA
For many elderly adults, downsizing is simply a part of aging. Moving from a large home to a smaller space takes a tremendous amount of pressure off of your seniors by eliminating the need to
care for the larger space, reducing the financial responsibility of the larger home, and even making mobility throughout the home safer and less strenuous. This enables you to create and execute a safer, more effective, and more personalized senior care plan that encourages your aging loved ones to enjoy the highest quality of life possible.
While downsizing is a great idea for helping your parents simplify their lives and remove stress, it can also be a challenging adjustment. Many seniors have lived in the same home for decades and are accustomed to that space. Moving into a different space can leave them feeling displaced and uncomfortable in the early weeks and months of living in the new home.
Helping your parents adjust to their new home after downsizing is an important element of protecting their mental and emotional health, and ensuring that they get maximum benefit from their care arrangement with you or their senior health care services provider. This means a happier, more comfortable, and less stressful lifestyle for everyone involved.
Use these tips, and share them with your parents' senior care provider, to help them adjust to this new chapter in their lives:
• Take your time. If possible, do not rush into downsizing. Take time to prepare properly so that the entire experience is not as overwhelming for your parents. This preparation also enables you to reduce your parents' belongings in a methodical way that reduces anxiety and ensures the right decisions are made for each item;
• Keep favorite items. As you reduce your parents' belongings, make sure you hang on to the things that mean the most for them so that you can bring them into their new home. This helps the new space feel like home so that your parents can feel more comfortable and at ease. Even if you are transitioning your parents into a home that is already furnished, find ways to integrate a few favorite pieces so they do not feel like a guest in their own new home;
• Decorate immediately. As soon as your parents have moved into the new home, get to work decorating the space. Even if you have not put everything away or are still trying to find the perfect furniture arrangement, start putting up personal items such as pictures, artwork, and knick-knacks that give those custom details to the space that make it feel like home;
• Go exploring. Encourage your parents to focus not just on their new home, but on the area around the home as well. This new chapter in their lives can mean a new community, new neighbors, new friends, and new activities. Bring your parents on a walk around the neighborhood, or encourage their senior health care services provider to head out for an afternoon with them so that they can get to know their new area and get excited about this new stage.
If you or an aging loved one are looking for senior care services in San Jose, CA, please call Familiar Surroundings Home Care. Call today!
Santa Clara County: (408) 600-2760
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Santa Cruz County: (831) 325-0890