How Storytelling Can Give Elders A Happier Family Thanksgiving

November 21, 2020

Want to increase aging parents and everyone’s enjoyment at Thanksgiving? Try storytelling using Thanksgiving memories.

As an aging professional, you can bring joy to an older person through reminiscence, storytelling, and oral history even elders with dementia

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 this 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, ask 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 story. It 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 this 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 parents’ life before. My 10 grandchildren have grown up 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.

StoryWorth For Thanksgiving

Another great idea to capture reminiscence when elders are safely sheltering in place is giving them StoryWorth.

Last Christmas my daughter, sent this gift to my 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 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, who has been sheltering in place since March with me, really enjoys writing about his past and the prompts have brought many vivid memories back to him.

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How to sell services to the desperate Aging Family during the holiday surge
How to give hope to frantic children who call when their aging parent struggling with Loneliness and isolation on the holidays
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How to counsel the Aging Family to track aging decline &Twindemic risk in loved ones
How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays
How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos
How to use financial forecasting to prepare for business growth during the holidays

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Ways to Deliver Loving Care for Family Caregivers on Valentines Day

February 5, 2020

What about Valentines gifts for family caregivers?

Think about Valentine’s gifts for family caregivers. What can a geriatric care manager do for family caregivers for valentine’s -the day is about love. Can we count the ways family caregivers who care for an aging family member represent the heart and soul love of Valentines’ Day?

Here are some ideas

Loving gifts from your agency, like a small gift of chocolate, is a typical valentine treat but also comes in handy to relieve stress and tastes sinfully good. Sending valentines to all of your family caregivers is a sweet idea, acknowledging their caring while letting them know your agency cares about them. Offering some respite to the local family if that is possible or your agency offering a special package of reduced fee hours to give some respite maybe on valentine’s day itself would be a sweet gift.

Another gift is the simple act of thanking them for all they do at such a cost to themselves, which is rarely voiced. Another list of gifts including pampering caregivers and a way to find the right spa is something you could share with an adult sibling or adult children. AARP has its own terrific list with aromatherapy and bath essentials

Gifts For Aging Parent Caring for a Spouse

To an aging parent caring for a spouse, they can experience most fraught-filled valentine’s day. The person who they gave all your heart to – at times for many decades- is there but not there in a way in many ways. So, suggesting to adult children that they might take taking the couple out for dinner or provide respite to the spouse and taking her to a special valentine’s brunch or event- can make a perfect gift. This can be a soulful warm gift for someone spending time with the love of their life who is not able to share the romantic day anymore.

Caregiver Gifts From Adult Children

Give adult children ideas for caregiver gifts.. Pinterest has a whole board of gifts for caregivers for valentine’s day. Grandchildren can also make inexpensive valentines gifts if she is caring for grandpa

Be a gold standard care management agency on Valentine’s day and show love for your family caregivers in any way you can.

How Storytelling Can Give Elders A Happier Family Thanksgiving

November 1, 2019

Want to increase aging parents and everyone’s enjoyment at Thanksgiving? Try storytelling using Thanksgiving memories.

As an aging professional, you can bring joy to an older person through reminiscence, storytelling, and oral history even elders with dementia

This Thanksgiving ask 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 story. It 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 this 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 parents’ life before. So a dual dose of quality of the older person of both the older person and the aging family is increased through oral history and reminiscence

Capture Your Families Past Before It Is Gone

SIGN UP FOR MY NEWEST FREE WEBINAR.

5 Ways to Tame the Turbulence of Holiday Meltdown in Aging Families

THIS FREE WEBINAR IS NOVEMBER 21, 2019 FROM 2 PM – 3 PM PST

Learn how!

How to give hope to frantic children who call, after seeing their aging parent struggling with the rituals
How to sell services to desperate adult child callers
How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos
How to use financial forecasting to prepare for growth during the holidays
How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays
Sidestep the Many Care Managers Who Do not know how to work with Dysfunctional Aging Families so the client choose you

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Caregiver Assessment- Here’s What It Takes Professionally

September 15, 2019

Doing TWO Assessments

To meet the needs of the whole family, principally the care receiver and the caregivers, GCMs need to begin assessing the caregiver as well as the care receiver. A caregiver assessment is defined by the National Center on Caregiving at the Family Caregiver Alliance as a systematic process of gathering the information that describes the caregiving situation and identifies particular problems, needs, resources, and strengths of a family caregiver. This new measure means that the care manager must see issues from a caregiver’s perspective and culture focuses on what assistance the caregiver may need, examine outcomes the family member wants for support and seeks to maintain the caregiver’s own health and well-being.

Create a Circle of Care

One resource that a GCM can bring to a caregiving family is what Gail Sheehy calls a circle of care. To create this supportive connection, the GCM needs to take her or his coaching skills and put together a support system around the formerly isolated, solitary family caregiver. The GCM can coach the family caregiver to ask for help so the GCM can assist in reorganizing the family so adult siblings can share in the care of the older client with the identified family caregiver. The GCM is what Sheehy calls a compassionate coach who can help the beleaguered caregiver attract and assemble a platform to keep on giving the care she or he wants to give the aging person.

Caregiver Resources

A circle of care includes emotional resources for the direct family caregiver. These emotional resources could and should include adult siblings. Reconnecting midlife brothers and sisters, through the circle of care, is an important GCM task, as siblings are the longest and deepest relationships in any person’s life. The GCM may have to depend on his or her clinical skills in helping siblings with forgiveness or reconnecting siblings who live long distances apart to add them to a circle of care. Midlife siblings have often spent the last 30 years tending to their own families, so the point of reconnection of midlife brothers and sisters often happens when they are in middle age in the midst of a crisis in parent care. This is where the GCM needs to employ clinical skills in midlife sibling work or to find the resources for the family to help with this healing sibling reconnection.

Genogram -Tools to Relieve a Family Caregiver-

September 9, 2019

What should be in your caregiver assessment toolbox?

A tool that you can tools use to solve the caregiver and care receiver’s problems you found in your care plan is a genogram.

A geriatric care managers assessment of the family caregiver is critical. Caregivers can and do fall apart. If you already did your caregiver assessment- great. But the extended family of the care receiver (client) should be assessed to find their strengths, weaknesses, dangers and real ability to help render caregiving services. This is where a genogram comes in.

A genogram allow you to see family patterns on a single page

Using a tool called a genogram can really show you the view of a family on a chart.Patterns in a family, especially the aging family that geriatric care managers and ALCA members serve, can be seen in a genogram showing you, for example, the generational cut off that happens over and over or alcoholism, or spousal abuse. You can see the weakness of family ties and where the care managers needed to focus to help the family get care for an older person.

A genogram allow you to see family support

A good genogram can be helpful in assessing the care receiver’s family support network and each relative’s relationship to the older client. Your genogram when paired with a psychosocial assessment, can help you assess whether the older client is living with a helpful spouse or partner, living with a difficult spouse, has relationship with an ex spouse, has cooperative and supportive children or grandchildren, has fighting or alienated children or grandchildren, has warring or alienated stepchildren or adoptive, has several children but only one child who “does it all,”.

In other words you pull up a traffic light, it is green, yellow or dangerous red. The genogram also can help tell the GCM whether you have ex spouses or partners who want to participate as caregivers and what their emotional relationship is the care receiver. In other words is there green-lighted support or red saying stop here-when the family caregiver desperately needs your GPS to find that that new road.

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