Elderly Care in Lansing MI: Benefits of Getting Crafty during National Craft Month
Being a family caregiver means that you are always looking for ways to help your elderly loved one enjoy better mental, emotional, and physical health throughout their later years. While there are many things that you can do to help them manage their challenges and limitations, help them avoid injuries and illnesses, and ensure that their tasks are fulfilled, it is important that you also plan ways to stimulate your parent’s mind, boost their mental and emotional health, and encourage them to express themselves. March is National Craft Month. This is the ideal opportunity for you to learn about the ways that encouraging your aging parent to do crafts on a regular basis can benefit them so that you can make it a part of your usual care routine.
Some of the potential benefits of getting crafty during National Craft Month and throughout the rest of the year include:
• Mental stimulation. Keeping the mind active and engaged is extremely important as your elderly adult gets older. Just like the muscles of their body, their brain needs to be used to stay strong, and if it is not, it can weaken and lose function. Doing crafts stimulates the mind in ways that it is not usually stimulated in normal daily life. This can help to keep their cognitive processing, critical thinking, problem solving, and memory skills sharp and responsive.
• Emotional and mental health boost. Doing crafts is a fantastic form of self-expression that encourages your parent to tell the world about themselves, their feelings, and their experiences through a variety of mediums. Making crafts can boost their mood and help to ward of mental and emotional health complications such as depression.
• Contribution to the world. Crafting can also enable your parent to feel as though they are making a true and positive contribution to the world around them. By making crafts they can create things that they can use around their own home, that they can give as gifts, or even that they can donate to charitable organizations to benefit those in need throughout the community and beyond. This can help your parent to feel more relevant and impactful, things that many elderly adults no longer feel as they age.
Starting elderly care for your aging loved one can be one of the best decisions that you can make for them during the course of your caregiver journey with them. An elderly home care services provider can be with your senior on a customized schedule that is right for their needs as well as their individual thoughts, beliefs, preferences, and lifestyle goals. This means that they are able to be as healthy, happy, comfortable, and safe as possible while also pursuing as much independence and activity as possible as they age in place. When it comes to stimulating their mind and keeping them active and engaged with crafts, this care provider can help your senior choose the crafts that fit in with their interests, skills, and abilities, plan these as a part of their care routine, and then participate in them with them so that they can get not only the benefits of the crafts themselves, but also the benefits of interaction with their care provider.
http://www.holidaytouch.com/retirement-101/senior-living-articles/creativity-and-aging-benefits-of-art-on-senior-health
If you or an aging loved one are considering elderly care in Lansing, MI, please contact the caring staff at Seniors Helping Seniors of Lansing. Call today: 517-332-9953.