Learn key senior eye health tips to help caregivers support vision care, early detection, and safe living environments for aging loved ones. Read on.

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.

Learn how to navigate situations when elderly parents in Visalia, CA refuse help. Explore ways to introduce in-home caregivers to ensure safety and well-being.

Listening is a skill that requires more than simply hearing. For medical providers and those who provide care for seniors, listening to those you care for is critical to their ongoing health and wellness. But as said before, listening is more than just hearing someone.

Chances are pretty high that if you’re an older adult, you’ve had to cope with the loss of at least one person who was close to you. It may be the loss of a parent, the death of a spouse, or the loss of one or more dear friends. Our lives are full of significant events, from graduations, to honeymoons, to any given night full of joy and laughter, each one leaves an indelible mark on our lives and the absence of a loved one can lead to feeling profound sadness, grief, and loneliness. The loved ones around us provide us with a sense of purpose and belonging, and without them, those feelings can be much harder to find.

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.

The strain of working together to make decisions about a parent’s care can strain even the closest families. Watching the health of your loved ones decline is always going to be tough. What complicates matters is that caregiving responsibilities are often not split equally between siblings, which can alone cause conflict.

If a senior family member or other loved one has cognitive impairment or some form of dementia such as Alzheimer’s, you may have noticed them acting differently in the late afternoon or early evening hours. Sundowning, which is also known as sundowners or sundown syndrome, is a term that refers to a group of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that people with cognitive impairments or dementia can often experience in the late afternoon or evening as the sun sets, but it can occur at other times as well. Sundowning can affect a person’s thinking, memory, personality, ability to reason, and their mood.

If you're an adult child or caregiver of a senior with arthritis, this blog post discusses various techniques to help them manage their pain.

This blog post provides adult children and caregivers with a helpful guide on how to meaningfully broach the issue of breast cancer with seniors, both men and women, who may show reluctance to discuss it.

Recognizing and addressing caregiver burnout is both challenging and crucial. If you see these signs of caregiver burnout in your spouse, it's crucial to take action.

When a loved one falls or has trouble rising from bed or a chair, we will of course want to help them. One of the essential talents of a caregiver is to safely move a loved one from surface to another. There are numerous types of transfers, with varying degrees of difficulty depending on aptitude and circumstances.

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.

The bigger part of ensuring seniors live a comfortable life begins with accountability from their adult children. They check on their senior loved ones often and take on other extra responsibilities to help the senior live a fulfilling life.

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.

As a caregiver, you will find yourself responsible for many tasks and situations that you may not have encountered in your life before, requiring skills that you may not possess already. When you find yourself in these moments, you may be wondering what is the best way to accomplish certain tasks. If your loved one requires a wheelchair as a mobility aid, assisting them with the use of it and caring for the wheelchair may be one such task.

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.

At Senior Helpers, we have cared for thousands of seniors over the past 20 years. Our caregivers are the key to delievering exceptional care. By choosing Senior Helpers for a loved one, you’re not just getting exceptional care for any of their needs, but you’re gaining a genuine, in-home connection designed to give them the absolute best quality of life.

When choosing a doctor for your eldery parents or other aging loved ones, there are a large number of different important elements to consider in the selection process. The issue for many people is that it can be difficult or not obvious to them what goes into choosing an effective doctor. After all, many of us who are younger and generally of sound health may have little to no experience with doctors and hospitals and medical treatment. But for our parents or other older relatives who are navigating their twilight years, the status quo for them and their health is multiple medications, regular checkups to ensure healthy lab tests and effective management of any chronic illnesses or conditions, and the potential for health emergencies at any time. The following criteria will be useful for anyone trying to determine if a given doctor is suited to care for your loved one.

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.

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.

In many families, when older adults need extra care to get through their days, adult children or grandchildren will step in to help. And while at first, this can be a workable arrangement, the task list can soon swell. Soon, helping out here and there becomes managing your loved one’s healthcare appointments, taking care of the house and domestic tasks, and sometimes performing hands-on health care tasks that may seem more appropriate for a trained medical professional to manage.