What to Do When Elderly Parents Refuse Help

Unfortunately, not all seniors are receptive to the idea of receiving care and may refuse to accept any care efforts. This can be frustrating, but you should not let it dissuade you from doing what is best for your parents. Instead, you should find ways to work through the refusal and get the elderly care plan into place with as little stress as possible.

What to Do When Elderly Parents Refuse Help

If you feel that it may be time to start a care journey with your elderly parents, but they are refusing your efforts, try these tips to cope with their refusal and to help guide them through this change so that they can start receiving the benefits of additional care and assistance:

1. Empathize With Them

It might seem like your seniors are just being difficult when they refuse to accept your help or to allow you to bring in a home care provider for them.

Take some time, however, to really think about how they must be feeling about the situation.

How do you think that you might feel if your children mentioned that they had noticed challenges and limitations that would require you to receive care or assistance in your home? Even if you knew that you were having problems, this prospect may seem upsetting and uncomfortable.

Empathizing with them can help you to take a gentler and more nurturing approach that can ease the tension and make them more likely to cooperate.

2. Get All of the Information

Whether they are resisting you helping them bathe, do not want you to do their grocery shopping for them, or are completely refusing to even discuss hiring an elderly health care services provider, try to find out why.

Getting to the source of their resistance can actually illuminate ways that you can overcome this refusal and make the process easier.

Through calm, open-ended conversations you may find that your parents are worried about losing their independence, are uncomfortable with modesty issues, or think that people are trying to take over their lives.

Once you find this problem, you can talk them through it and help them to see how a care journey can actually benefit them.

3. Ask for Professional Guidance

Parents are prone to thinking that their children just think that they are “too old” or “feeble” and that you do not actually have an accurate perception of their limitations or needs.

Get in touch with their doctor and meet with him to discuss your concerns and ask that he reinforce your parents’ need for care and assistance. Hearing it from a professional can help them to feel more accepting and realize that it is not just you who thinks that they need help.

4. Wait It Out

If you are spending the holidays with your parents, wait until after they come to an end to reiterate your insistence that they get more help around the house. This ensures you can enjoy the holiday and when it comes time to have this difficult discussion you will not also be contending with the stress of preparing for celebrations. This also gives you a chance to build up a list of reference points that you can bring up during the conversation to illustrate your point.

Contact Sonas for Home Health Care Services in Florida

If you or an aging loved one are considering home health care services in Florida, contact the caring staff at Sonas Home Health Care. Call today (888) 592-5855.

Jillian Miller BSN, RN

Director of Nursing at Sonas Home Health Care

This blog was reviewed by Jillian Miller BSN, RN — Director of Nursing for Sonas Home Health Care’s Tampa Bay market — for clinical accuracy. Jillian Miller has been a nurse for 16 years — working primarily in pediatrics. She believes the best part of working with the pediatric population is when you see smiles from clients when you first enter the room. She loves seeing the difference you can make in families’ lives while providing the best care possible for them.