Ep 2 - How can we help our parents be safer at home? - The Background

Helping Our Parents Thrive - Episode 2 discusses ways that we can help our parents be a little bit more safe at home, whether in their own home, your home, or assisted living.
You will get a bit of background on why this is important, a few conversation starters to help you get your parent's agreement to even do an evaluation AND a story from an actual evaluation that I am certain will inspire you to take action. Even if just baby steps! 

The next episode, 3, will take you through an actual Online Evaluation you can conduct with your parents.  Together we Thrive. 

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Helping Our Parents Thrive podcast, here to support adult children of seniors like you and me in caring for our parents and ourselves. I'm Melissa Uppleshoden, your host, and today we are talking about ways that we can help our parents be a little bit more safe at home, whether in their own home, your home, or assisted living. Hopefully there will be a tip or two that you can take away, no matter where they put their head down at night. I'm glad you're here. If you were able to listen to Episode 1, you heard the background on how HopThrive came to be, and what inspired me to become a Senior Home Safety Specialist. My podcast from here on out will mainly be deep dives into topics related to how we can best support our parents through the aging process. This episode's topic is one that is near and dear to my heart, senior home safety. And I'm honored to be your expert on this episode. We're going to dive deep into how you can help your parent or parents To be just a bit more safe at home. I am a firm believer in just in case and baby steps. You will hear those words over and over again in this podcast. Let me share with you how this podcast is going to flow. I'm going to split it into two parts. The first part, I will spend a few minutes talking about why this is important, and then I'll give you some conversation starters for you to get your parents agreement to even do an evaluation. And finally, I will share a story with you from an actual evaluation that I'm hoping will inspire you to take action. That is where part one will end. And part two will be me walking you through an actual evaluation. We'll start with the why. No one plans to fall, but yet at the time of this recording, 36 million adults over 65 report falling each year in the U. S. And that is just reported, so we know it's much more than that. Falls lead to a lack of independence. I do not know a single parent that wants to be dependent on others, especially their children. Also, according to a recent study by AARP, about 75 percent of adults 50 plus would like to stay in their current homes or communities for as long as possible. That's the why. Let's move on to broaching the topic with your parent. It is important to have proactive conversations with our parents about being safer at home. We all realize that our parents capabilities are changing over time, just as ours do, and it's important to do periodic evaluations of their capabilities. It is also important that we use the right words to even broach this topic with our parents. Talking about aging with loved ones is often considered taboo. I have some prompts to hopefully help you with that conversation. I've categorized seniors into three personas, and I'm hoping that one of them will fit. I will take you through the warm hearted senior, the cost conscious senior and the crotchety senior. For the warm hearted senior, I love you and I selfishly want you active in my life for as long as I possibly can. I heard about a home safety evaluation that we could do together to identify a few things that might make it safer for you at home. I know that you are fine now, but just in case, would you mind if we go through this together? For the cost conscious senior, have you seen how crazy the cost of assisted living has been getting? I heard about a home safety evaluation that we could do together to identify a few things that might make it safer for you at home. I know you are fine now, but just in case, would you mind if we go through this together? And for the crotchety senior, like it or not, we are stuck with each other for a while. How about we make certain you're at least safer at home? I heard about a home safety evaluation that we can do together to identify a few things that might make it safer for you at home. I know you are fine now, but just in case, would you mind if we go through this together? Again, hopefully one of those resonates. The key is really opening the door to the conversation, and hopefully you've gained their agreement. If they aren't quite ready yet, gently explain that this is important to you, and would it be okay for you to revisit this conversation in a few weeks, or whatever seems like a reasonable time frame for you. Once you gain their agreement, it's time to act. I would recommend doing a complete walkthrough of their house, then putting together a list of potential improvements and tracking them until completion. Slow and steady is typically the approach I would recommend. Let me share one story that will hopefully inspire you. I did an online evaluation for a client. The dad was living on his own and the daughter just wanted another pair of eyes on his living situation. We had just taken a break from walking around and she and her dad were sitting at the kitchen table and I asked about the location of the smoke detectors and her dad paused and responded, there were none. I will never forget her surprised reaction. But this is a no judgment zone. She just wanted to make it right. So a few days later, she had been out with her dad, and she had recently purchased the smoke detectors to install for him. When she dropped them off, she brought them inside. He was in the other room, and she stepped into the kitchen. There, on the stove, was a red light. When she went closer to look at it, she realized that it was indicating that the stovetop was on with a pan on the burner. Luckily, it was set to low, but she could feel that the pan was hot and had a dark stain in the bottom of it. She lovingly inquired when her dad last cooked, and it was over a day ago. You guessed it. He had left the pan on the stove overnight. I am so grateful that she was brave enough to share this story with me. And this is not a unique situation. Things that were once second nature, like taking a pan off the stove, are just not as easy to remember as our parents age. We need to be proactive and help our parents put some safety mechanisms in place. This is where Part 1 ends. As a reminder, Part 2 will take you through an actual online evaluation. Thank you for listening. If you got something out of this episode, please be sure to follow or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and rate us so that more people can find out about Hop Thrive. And if you feel like it, share both our Helping Our Parents Thrive podcast and Facebook community with anyone that you feel may need a little support as well. Visit us at hopthrive. com for more information. Together, we thrive.