Parents need help - but with household things
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Anonymous
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My parents (mom, 76, and stepdad, 96) live alone at home and are doing well except need help with laundry, meal prep, day to day things like that. I think it would be helpful to have someone who could stay with my stepdad if my mom needs to go to the doctor or out for awhile. Stepdad is a veteran and I heard the VA offers services like this but couldn't really pin down what that is.
What kind of service is this that I would get them? |
Anonymous
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Caregiver, 4 hour minimum per day, M-F.
Caregiver can get laundry going and help Mom with laundry. Caregiver can also make meals in advance that Mom and Dad can reheat. This still allows Mom and Dad a lot of autonomy in their lives. |
Anonymous
| Home health aide. If they can't meal prep then stepdad probably needs help bathing. |
Anonymous
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My mom can meal prep, and they definitely can both bathe. They both have doctor's appointments and my stepdad doesn't drive so she spends a lot of time making their appointments and then driving to them. Laundry requires stairs and I'm not comfortable with her carrying laundry up two flights of stairs, though she can do it.
They are not open to anything if it matters! |
Anonymous
| If they are not open to it it won't happen. Sorry. I learned from experience. It just gets harder. |
Anonymous
If it matters? Of course it matters. How are you going to arrange something if they don’t want it? |
Anonymous
If they are not open to having someone come to the house, what about sending their laundry out? What about having meals delivered? What about hiring someone specifically to drive to the appointments? |
Anonymous
| Op here - I can’t believe the tone on some of these comments here. All of your elderly relatives welcomed your interventions with open arms? Sorry I asked. |
Anonymous
What you hear in the tone is frustration and "been there, done that" experience. Some of us have learned that badgering our parents to do reasonable, obvious things that would improve their safety/quality of life doesn't really work. We want you to save yourself the headache. |
Anonymous
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Yeah, we’ve all been there. In my experience two older people together are much more resistant to having in-home care than one alone.
Home health aids can be hired from agencies. There is a four hour minimum. It’s not a big deal to get somebody in. But my parents never accepted such help. All the stuff around the house, laundry, vacuuming in large part had become their life. That’s what they spend their time doing, just kind of puttering around. So they didn’t want somebody else to do it! They were happy making their own meals, or barely wanted to eat anything. They didn’t have much laundry, and did it in tiny little loads. It is extraordinarily frustrating to look at someone else’s life and see how changes could make it better, but maybe they may feel the same way looking at our lives. My parents puttered around alone until there was a health crisis that rendered one basically unable to walk and the other could not care for them (Social worker would not let them just go home together because it was unsafe.) and so at that point they had to accept care in the home unless they were going to go to a facility, which they liked even less. Until that point, they excepted zero help, despite my entreaties. And honestly, it got really bad, they persisted in living alone even though they could no longer manage their medications, etc. etc. There was *nothing* I could do about it. If your mother is a caregiver your best bet might be posing this as a way for *her* to get some time to herself, to go get her hair done, all that stuff while someone is at home with her husband. And you could say since the person has to be there, they might as well do some laundry or something…Pitch it to her as a way to help her husband. And then separately, pitch it to her husband as a way to help her… “She’s wearing herself out doing laundry” or whatever. That’s what I tried but honestly I had no luck with it. |
Anonymous
This. What you can try is to first get a case manger in the door to assess need and coordinate care. That will cost A LOT, but the person is trained to talk to elderly in such a way that they may be more open to it. It also is useful because you parents may keep firing people and people don't show up and they start to think a caregiver is stealing (which can be true or the parent forgot where she/he put something and it turns up). After enough years it can drive you insane and it's nice to contract out the job of listening to them complaining, finding the right people, assessing when they need more care and getting them to accept that. |
Anonymous
Welcome to our world. |
Anonymous
So my dad is a veteran and has a disability rating (I do not know if you can get services if you are not enrolled in va healthcare). He was approved for 8 hours a week of respite care. Dad has end stage Parkinsons and Mom is his caregiver (and still recovering from breaking her hip caring for him). I arranged for this by speaking to his social worker at the va. He has already been declared 'incompetent'-it's their way of saying he's disabled. With this designation, the social worker arranged respite. Here's the part you need to understand OP. My parents also are VERY resistant to outside help. I was SO excited for respite to start so Mom could have a little time to attend to her own health/therapies, grocery shop, whatever. The caregiver from the agency was so nice, but Mom only used it 3 times before cancelling it! I was SO UPSET. I'm still upset. OP, I hope your folks aren't like this but chances are they might be. It's incredibly hard and frustrating when you try your best to help and get shut down. Like another PP mentioned, I assume that there WILL be a health crisis at some point and then our hand will be forced. |
Anonymous
| Out of all my friends, family, and coworkers I have known of ONE person whose parent accepted help without a fuss and without it coming to a health crisis. ONE. And these are people of varying socioeconomic profiles. All the rest were happy to have family members help them, including family members continually flying across the country, leaving little kids, spouses, and jobs in the lurch. |
Anonymous
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DAV may be able to help you navigate the maze of veteran benefits
https://www.dav.org/get-help-now/va-benefits-help/ |