Managing Family Dynamics When Seniors Need Care: Home Care Services Can Help

As people age, it’s natural to experience changes. This is especially true in older adulthood. Aging adults can be faced with changes in physical and mental health, independence and mobility, and social connections and relationships, to name just a few. For many seniors and their loved ones, these changes are often experienced as losses and can cause elevated stress and a sense of grief if not talked about openly and positively among family members. Add a healthy dose of long-standing family dynamics to later life changes and you have a recipe for family tension and trepidation.

At Midnight Sun Home Care, we recognize that in situations like this, it’s not just older adults who struggle, but that families may also experience complicated emotions. Our experienced staff and home care services in Anchorage AK can help. Family dynamics help to shape who we are and how we relate to the ones we love, and the roots from our past can grow deep. It’s a tall order to try to unlearn lifelong habits of how we communicate with loved ones, but a heightened awareness of the things you can do to improve family communications can be extremely helpful. When a tenuous family history collides with a present family caregiving need, it is still possible to work together with family members to achieve a positive outcome.

AARP offers the following tips to help family members overcome difficult dynamics and provide the very best and most thoughtful care for a loved one:

• Learn from the past. Completely forgetting past grievances may be too lofty of a goal to achieve, but it is possible to gain insight and a renewed perspective when viewing through the lens of lessons learned and the perspective that time allows.
• Focus on positives. If your strained relationships are like most, they’re made up of both difficult and pleasant memories. Draw from the positive experiences you’ve had with a family member and try to focus more fully on those.
• Rely on your values. Rather than refusing to participate in a loved one’s care because of a hurt that a loved one has inflicted upon you, fall back on your core values, such as the importance of helping others and treating them the way you’d like to be treated.

At Midnight Sun Home Care, we understand how family relationships can change when a senior begins to require care, and that changes in an older loved one are experienced differently by each member of the family. Through relationship building and active listening, the professional Anchorage AK caregivers at Midnight Sun Home Care take great care to understand each individual we serve and their full support network so that reinforcement of familial relationships can take place.

To learn more about our personalized, family-focused Anchorage AK home care services and how we can help you navigate complicated family dynamics, contact us today. We’re always ready to listen, support, and assist.