Discover how senior travel groups offer adventure, connection, and support. Learn how caregivers can help older adults enjoy safe, enriching travel experiences.

If you’re caring for a family member who is suffering from COPD, you are no doubt familiar with all the symptoms such as coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath. As a caregiver and a loved one, your goal is no doubt to help the person have the best possible quality of life despite their living with COPD. While there is currently no cure for COPD available, it is treatable and there are things you can do to help.

In the United States of America, over 53 million people are caregivers for either an adult or children with chronic health conditions or disabilities. This figure accounts for one in five Americans, and will only continue to grow as the population of the country ages, and more numbers of older adults will require at least some assistance to maintain their quality of life.

Explore caregiving challenges, like dietary restrictions, and find solutions. Navigate with ease. Learn more.

If you live hundreds, or possibly even thousands of miles away from your loved ones, you may find yourself wondering how you can best go about caring for your elderly parents when they need a little bit of extra care and support. While long distance caregiving certainly isn’t without its challenges and difficulties, many families are able to discover that it can all be accomplished with great amounts of success.

Many of us have a collection in one form or another. Perhaps we buy snow globes or refrigerator magnets as souvenirs whenever we go on a trip. Maybe you collect jewelry or other items from a specific time period. You might have binders filled with years of baseball cards, or boxes with bagged and boarded comic books. But while compulsive hoarding may seem similar at first blush, it is a different animal than simply having a collection or two that have gotten out of control.

According to the CDC, roughly one out of every four adults acts as some form of caregiver to someone with a long term illness or disability, in an unpaid or informal capacity. It is projected that by the year 2030, there will be about 71 million adults in the United States aged 65 or older, which means that the need for caregivers can only increase from here.

Finding a caregiver for a loved one can be a daunting task. They’ll need to be reliable, trustworthy, competent, and compassionate. But how do you know what to look for? There are some key qualities that go towards making someone into an excellent caregiver.

With the average individual life expectancy rising, parents are living longer and longer as their children continue to age deeper into adulthood themselves. Many of those who are caregivers to their elderly parents are themselves elderly. In fact, the average age of someone who is giving care to someone aged 65 or older is a surprisingly high 63 years old themselves. This means that many of those engaged in caregiving are themselves aging along with those they care for, which results in many retirement-aged adult children caring for their senior parents.

While too much sitting isn’t good for anyone, no matter the age group, spending long amounts of time seated is especially critically dangerous for the elderly. With age comes muscles that degrade much faster than those of young people, which means that extra attention needs to be paid to the amount of time in chairs, both by the elderly and their caregivers and loved ones.

Many of us work full time and are also busy with other responsibilities, such as raising children, managing their own homes, and engaging in social activities or hobbies. This makes taking on the role of a family caregiver in the event that a loved one suddenly has a condition or illness that requires regular care difficult.

As an adult child with parents in their elderly years, it can be incredibly rewarding and enriching to give back and spend time caring for them after all the years they spent caring for you as you grew up from a child to the adult you are now.

Most people on the planet don’t like being told what to do. For elderly people, who have lived their lives successfully and accumulated a lifetime of knowledge and experience, this tends to be even less so. Most seniors tend to bristle or get defensive when decisions are getting made on their behalf. But the problem is that it’s vital for adult children and other caregivers and loved ones to intercede on behalf of seniors should it be necessary for their care. Not all seniors will require that level of intervention, but many do. This is why it’s important to plan ahead, so you’re not stumbling unprepared through a difficult conversation when there’s no choice but to have it at that exact moment.  

Being a caregiver is a delicate balancing act at times, whether you’re caring for an elderly parent, another loved relative, or a spouse. On the one hand, you want the best for them and you want to help them to thrive and overcome challenges in the same way they have all their lives. But on the other hand, your loved one deserves a well-earned, restful twilight years, after a busy, active adult life, and you certainly don’t want to push them beyond their limits and capabilities. And it is just as likely that your loved one has thoughts and opinions about their care as well, and will wish to remain as independent as possible, as well as not wanting to feel like they’re being a burden to you. As a result, they may be hesitant to confront, or sometimes completely avoid, any of the hard stuff, or overextend themselves trying to take it on alone. Change is hard for everyone, especially the changes brought as a result of aging.

Earth Day 2022 may have already come and gone, but caring for the environment and being responsible stewards of our planet and resources is a year round job. The first Earth Day was celebrated over 50 years ago, in 1970. The holiday was, at the time, created to bring attention to the dangers of the far too common smog that was choking our major cities at the time. Since then, it has evolved into a much larger movement, one meant to bring forth the most pressing issues facing us and our environment, raising consciousness of them and what can be done.

Caregiving is a universal experience. Nearly everyone will, at one point in their life, either be a caregiver, need a caregiver, or oftentimes both. Caregiving requires a personal touch, to do what is needed to relieve stress and burdens on those who need care, and their loved ones. Whether a caregiver is part of your family, a close friend, or someone hired from an outside agency, they will develop personal relationships while taking care of needs and business both in and outside of the house. Regardless if the caregiver is providing care to you, or to a loved one, there are a few simple ways to say thank you.

When your job or time revolves around caring for another, one of the things that’s easy to let fall by the wayside is your own personal well-being. Exercise is incredibly important for not only physical health, but mental as well. Follow these tips for how to better find time for yourself to keep yourself active, and healthy.

One fact that many people know as an interesting bit of trivia is that the human body has 206 bones in the skeleton. But, there’s a follow up fact that is a bit lesser known. It’s that 52 of those bones, or more than a quarter, are contained in the feet! That makes it one of the most complicated and engineered structures in the body, and it makes sense because they’re literally the foundation on which the entire skeletal system, and the organs, muscles, and other tissues supported by it, rest.