The bathroom and the kitchen are not the only places where your family member can get hurt. Most households have other danger zones as well. Controlling access to these areas becomes an issue sooner or later in most caregiving households.

When you care for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, accessibility can be a double-edged concern. You may want to make some areas in your home “off-limits”, such as outside doors, stairways, closets and other places where important or potentially harmful materials are stored. On the other hand, you may want to improve access to some areas – making tubs and showers more accessible or making stairways and outside steps easier to use.

As a rule of thumb, try to improve access in areas that encourage the person to do things independently as long as it is safe. Limit access when the family member’s abilities and understanding have diminished to the point that he or she needs supervision to be in an area.

How can families come together in caregiving?  Here are some suggestions:

• Express your feelings honestly and directly. Let your siblings know their help is both wanted and needed.
• Keep family members informed regarding a parent’s condition.
• Be realistic in your expectations. Allow siblings to help in ways they are able and divide tasks according to individual abilities, current life pressures and personal freedoms. Assistance with errands, finances, legal work or other indirect care may be the best option for some family members.
• Express appreciation to your family for help they are able to provide.
• Accept siblings for who they are and expect differences of opinion.
• Try to respect other’s perceptions and find opportunities to compromise.

If communication is particularly contentious, arrange a family meeting that includes an outside facilitator, such as your FCA Family Consultant, social worker, counselor, religious leader or friend. A trusted outside party can ensure that everyone’s voice is heard.

If siblings are unable to help with care, seek other assistance to provide a respite for yourself. Call your local Caregiver Resource Center, Area Agency on Aging, Senior Center or other community resource to locate help.

Try to forgive family members who continue to refuse to get involved in a loved one’s care. The only thing we have control over in a situation is our reaction. Attempt to work through your negative emotions to take care of yourself and move forward.

http://www.caregiver.org/caregiver/jsp/content_node.jsp?nodeid=868

Providing care for an aging or ill parent can bring out the best and the worst in sibling relationships. Ideally, the experience of caregiving is a time for siblings to come together and provide mutual support to one another. However, as a stressful transition, the pressure can also lead to strained connections and painful conflict.

One major source of sibling friction is the legacy of family dynamics. Invariably, the demands of caregiving bring out old patterns and unresolved tensions. Past wounds are reopened and childhood rivalries reemerge. It is not unusual for adult children to find themselves replaying their historical roles in the family, recreating old dynamics of competition and resentment as they vie for mom’s attention and affection.

Another conflict can arise when one sibling is in denial over a parent’s condition. Adult children who seem unable to accept the reality of a parent’s illness and refuse involvement may be protecting themselves from facing a parent’s eventual death and their own loss. More active siblings may react with bitterness and anger.

Most often though, discord surfaces from the unequal division of caregiving duties. Generally, one sibling takes on the primary role of caring for a loved one. This may be because he or she lives closest to a parent, is perceived as having less work or fewer family obligations, or is considered the “favorite” child. Regardless of the reasons, this situation can lead the overburdened caregiver to feel frustrated and resentful and other siblings to feel uninformed and left out.

Resolving these conflicts can be challenging. But ignoring the difficulties in a caregiving situation can create greater challenges. Ultimately, strained family relationships can impede a family’s capacity to provide the greatest quality of care to a parent.

Gardening has wonderful benefits for the muscles.  When carrying bags of soil, flats of flowers, or tools, make sure that they’re not too heavy for you.  Lift things in separate shifts if need be, but carrying the right amount of weight at a time is great for bone density and muscle toning.

Keeping up a garden also requires walking, digging, and planting.  All of these actions promote cardiovascular health by slightly elevating the heart rate and deepening the breath.  This improves circulation, lung capacity, and overall health.  Again, only do as much as feels comfortable and invigorating.

Swatting, kneeling, turning and twisting are great for your joints.  When it comes to flexibility, you really need to use it or lose it.  While gardening, focus on the subtle movements, and how the various actions are keeping your muscles and joints alive and well.

Gardening can also be great for you emotional health as well as physical health.  Relax and take deep breaths while gardening.  Admire all the colors and scents, have picnics in your garden, or maybe your first cup of coffee in the morning.  There’s no greater fulfillment than admiring the natural beauty around you that has been nurtured by your own hard work.

Americans are reversing what had been a nearly century-long decline in the participation of older people in the workforce.

For both workers and employers, the rising number of older workers is the result of choice and circumstance.

Workers, faced with shrinking medical and dental benefits and less generous retirement plans, find they don’t have the financial resources to support themselves in retirement, so a lot more of them are returning to work.

Companies, faced with a labor gap that will rise to 4.8 million workers within 10 years and 20 million within 20 years, are seeing older workers in a new light. Older workers represent a pool of talent companies need.

Conventional wisdom used to be that employees over 50 cost companies more in terms of medical problems and missed workdays. But that may not be the case, as studies show that costs associated with older workers are about the same as those of younger workers.

Workers over 50 make up for additional health costs by being more reliable and often more productive than younger workers. An AARP survey of human resource professionals showed that 77% said that older workers have a higher level of commitment than younger workers, and 68% said it cost less or the same to train older workers compared to younger workers.

Older workers also tend to have fewer or no dependent-related health- or child-care costs, and they require lower training and recruitment costs, according to Gail Jern, human resources manager for Westaff.

Senior Fun

This month, we offer up some classic zingers….

“I feel so miserable without you, it’s almost like having you here.” —Stephen Bishop

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.” —Groucho Marx

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” —Oscar Wilde

“He had delusions of adequacy.” —Walter Kerr

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” —Clarence Darrow

And finally, this exchange between George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill:

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend…if you have one.” —George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second…if there is one.” —Winston Churchill, in reply

Are Seniors a Threat on the Road?

We’ve all seen the stereotype — a tiny 80-year-old woman peeping over a steering wheel as she goes along a highway at 8 miles per hour, oblivious to the danger she’s creating all around her.

Like most stereotypes, this one is wrong — at least according to a poll of drivers of all ages.

When asked if they had been in a collision within the last five years, 28% of seniors reported that they had — the smallest percentage of any age group.

Drivers in general say the greatest threats to highway safety are aggressive drivers (37%), distracted drivers (37%), teen drivers (14%) and, last, seniors (11%).

Some of the categories overlap: teen drivers are also more likely to be distracted drivers, as 32% say they have read or sent text messages while driving.

The public does think that persons over 75 should be retested for driving skills every two years.

Mason-Dixon Polling and Research conducted the poll, which was sponsored by Volvo.

It’s long been assumed that memory loss, slower thinking and eventual dementia are the natural results of aging.

Dr. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, disagrees. The human brain, he says, doesn’t need to decline with age. It, like the body, responds to exercise and stimuli.

Merzenich founded Posit Science, which is developing brain fitness programs designed to improve the thinking abilities of seniors. These self-paced computer programs are like video games, only these are designed to stimulate certain brain functions such as listening and memory. One hour a day, five days a week may increase cognitive functioning by as much as 10 years.

While the Posit Science Brain Fitness Program offers exciting possibilities for enabling an aging population’s minds to keep pace with ever increasing longevity, we’re not dependent upon a computer program to stretch and strengthen our brains.

Engaging in a range of activities that spur new learning as well as participating in physical activities that require an ongoing mastery of motor control will strengthen the brain.

Examples of such activities include:

• learning to play a musical instrument or a new language
• juggling
• dancing
• solving jigsaw puzzles
• playing ping pong

In the not-so-distant future, senior centers, nursing homes and assisted living facilities may include “brain gymnasiums” along with recreation and exercise areas.

Use it or lose it? Evidence points to exercise as possibly slowing Alzheimer’s.

Exercising the body helps the brain. That’s the conclusion of a new study that reviewed the effects of exercise on brain functioning in humans and animals.

Based on a wide-ranging review of existing studies, researchers found a significant relationship between physical activity and later cognitive function and decreased occurrence of dementia. Better yet, the evidence suggests that the benefits may last several decades.

Studies of persons over age 65 found that those who exercised for at least 15-30 minutes at a time three times a week were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s Disease, even if they were genetically predisposed to the disease.

The exercise doesn’t have to be strenuous. One study of 62- to 70-year-olds who continued to work and retirees who moderately exercised, showed they had higher sustained levels of cerebral blood flow and superior performance on general measures of cognition as compared to the group of inactive retirees.

The review covered 40 years of research.

Successful aging is an absence of (or minimum of) disease and disability. A new study of more than 500 persons from age 60 to 98 shows that people who think they are “aging successfully” aren’t necessarily the healthiest individuals. Optimism and effective coping tools, or attitude, were found be essential to successful aging more than traditional measures of health and wellness, according to a study funded by the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California-San Diego.

The study showed that persons who regularly read, write and socialize gave themselves higher scores than those who did not. Surprisingly, volunteer activities, which have long been thought to help persons age successfully, were not found to have the same positive influence. The bottom line is that those things leading to successful aging are well within an individual’s control. The key is adopting personal coping mechanisms and remaining as physically, socially and mentally active as possible.