Want to increase aging parents’ and everyone’s enjoyment at Thanksgiving? Try storytelling at Thanksgiving using elders’ memories.
As an aging professional, you can bring joy to an older person through reminiscence, storytelling, and oral history for elders
This Thanksgiving, if you really do travel to a family home or grandma’s house, travel safely If not make the safest choice, stay home and use Zoom and include your elderly
parent. You can do oral history for elders if they can use a computer or have a family member or friend who visits often and who lives nearby and is in their bubble serve and share Thanksgiving dinner at their home and use zoom with them to see other family members on the holiday.
Share Your Thanksgiving Story
If you are at a family member’s holiday dinner and use reminiscence for elders by asking everyone to tell their favorite story about a Thanksgiving dinner. Start with midlife members to get the idea and then ask
again parents to share their stories. Oral history for elders will bring extra thanks to Thanksgiving by learning about an elder’s past and giving them the opportunity to share, which sometimes they do not do in the hubbub of family talking.
The “telling ” also means someone documents. That magically gives the elder and a child social interaction and connectedness. Elders vividly recall their past by telling
from vignettes in their life – especially life in their 20’s, which sparks the richest recall called the “20’s bump”, according to researchers.
Elders sharing stories means passing on history.
So try storytelling at Thanksgiving and it becomes intergenerational. The older person is given a chance to give the larger picture of their life and family history to children and grandchildren or extended family, who may not have heard all the details of their grandparent’s or parent’s life before. My 10 grandchildren have grown with their now 80-year-old grandfather telling them exciting stories of when he was a California Highway patrolman. So a dual dose of a higher quality of life for both the older person and the aging family is increased through oral history and reminiscence.
Capture Your Families Past Before It Is Gone
Many midlife adults now do ancestry and regret that they did not ask questions of older family members when they were alive. Capture that past now on this family holiday. An aging professional or a geriatric care manager can suggest family or friends record the Thanksgiving story as oral history using technology like an i Phone or i Pad.
Story Telling at Thanksgiving with Story Worth
Another great idea to capture reminiscence for elders is giving them StoryWorth.
My daughter sent this gift to her Dad and both he and I love it. Each week StoryWorth sends a question to my husband that prompts him to write about his past. He writes his reminiscence out longhand and I easily use the dictation on my phone and email his story to Story Worth.
At the end of the year, my daughter will order a bound book of all the stories- a whole collection of memories, an oral history of an elder father that she might never think to ask and will be saved for her and her children to pass on family history. I will order a copy for all her three siblings. Equally important, my husband, really enjoyed writing about his past and the prompts have brought many vivid memories back to him.
SIGN UP FOR MY FREE WEBINAR
Sign Up for My New Years Webinar
11 Clinical Steps to Work with Dysfunctional Families-Post Holidays –
Thursday, January 6, 2:00 PM 3:30 PM Pacific
Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday
Join me and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stockings.
Learn how to:
Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders
Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family
Master the 5 Clinical Tools – you need – to solve these problems with your clients
Learn Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families
Sign -Up Now so even if You Cannot Attend You Get the recording
Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel Geriatric Care 1
life. He’s drinking too much at the local pub. When the daughter puts the post-turkey leftovers in the refrigerator she finds moldy food on every shelf. When asked about the bills and the moldy food, Dad gets really angry at them when he was an easygoing guy all his life. This is the holiday push where they pick up the phone and scream 911 to a care manager.
families reach out for someone to fix it.
Labor to lower the standard of care of investment advice fiduciaries, and this represents a dramatic and unprecedented reversal of the intent of Congress in enacting ERISA.
for having the amount of productivity to keep the business thriving. Handwriting is not a lost art. It sends a message that you take the time, personally, to really celebrate what the employees do for your business.
to tell them you are grateful for their hard work. Create a formal letter recognizing your employee’s achievement. Sign it and use the company’s seal to give the letter something extra. If you really want to do it right, frame it too.
with Loneliness and isolation on the holidays