If you are a family caregiver, you already know that it is a stressful role to take on. Between coordinating care and transportation for your loved one, keeping up on new prescriptions, and making sure your loved one is eating enough, it can feel impossible to actually still connect to your loved one like a daughter or son.
Caregiving in any way causes stress on the caregiver and on the rest of the family. Having a family caregiver can even cause stress on the person receiving the support. What’s the solution? You might be surprised to hear that home care services can significantly decrease family stress and increase the quality of life for everyone involved. Here’s how.
Home Care Preserves Dignity
For many older adults, having an adult child help them with personal tasks such as bathing or using the bathroom can feel especially vulnerable. Even though the adult child is happy to help in that way, the older adult can end up feeling like a burden or feel embarrassed. In either case, it decreases feelings of dignity.
Home care services take that embarrassment or feelings of being a burden away. Instead of an adult daughter helping with personal care tasks, an experienced and friendly professional is there to take care of it instead. This way, the older adult feels that sense of dignity, and the family caregiver doesn’t have to take on that personal role.
Home Care Encourages Meaningful Connections
As a family caregiver, you might feel like you haven’t had a “normal” conversation with your loved one in years. If you think about it, when was the last time that you felt like a daughter or son and your older loved one felt like a mom or dad? In most cases, family caregivers can begin to take on that maternal or paternal role, leaving everyone in the situation feeling disorientated at this new approach.
When a CaringGivers caregiver enters the home to provide services, they are taking care of a lot of those caregiver tasks. This means that a daughter can come over and allow an aging parent to guide the conversation or share their workday instead of coming over to cook dinner or get the grocery list planned. Our team provides services so that family members can connect in their previous roles, which makes a huge difference for everyone involved.
Home Care Offers an Objective and Professional Point of View
Family stress increases as a matriarch or patriarch figure grow older. It happens in nearly every family, no matter how functional they are and how great the relationships are. As someone in the family grows older and their health or abilities decline, it can cause feelings of grief for everyone which can result in lots of differences of opinions or arguments.
While a CaringGivers caregiver will certainly never take a side during a family discussion, their observations are an important piece to the puzzle when determining the next steps. They are able to say if they have found that the older adult is becoming more confused or if they need more assistance lately with personal care tasks. These objective and professional points of view are often able to give new insight to family members who are struggling to see how their loved one is actually doing with daily tasks.
Of course, the team at CaringGivers is always available to provide relevant documentation or recommendations as well. We have been serving seniors across the D.C. area for years and are happy to guide family members as they weigh their next steps.
If you are feeling the strain of caregiver stress, seek out help now. Don’t wait until a family argument or until your health is compromised from caregiver fatigue. Call our office today to schedule a free consultation.