Benefits of Playing Games with Your Elderly Parent on Play Monopoly Day
Being a family caregiver for your senior is not just about managing their physical health and well-being.
While you want to make sure your parent is able to manage any health issues or illnesses they have and stay safe in their home, in order to truly give them the best care and quality of life, you must also think about their mental, emotional, and cognitive health and well-being.
Stimulating their mind is critical to ongoing functioning, and this can be accomplished as simply as spending some quality family time together. November 5th is Play Monopoly Day.
This is the perfect opportunity to get together and enjoy this classic board game. Not only will it allow you to maximize the time you have with both generations, but can also offer a variety of tremendous benefits.
Some benefits of playing games with your elderly parent include:
- Social interaction with people they love
- A greater sense of importance and value
- A greater sense of relevance, and involvement in their family
- Following rules and utilizing strategy uses complex thinking that supports faster, more effective thought processes and decision-making skills
- Following rules and knowing what to do at each stage of the game works the memory skills, helping your parent to retain memories and recall them more quickly and accurately
- Skills such as math used during the game keep these same skills, as well as those related to them, sharper
- Spending time with the family promotes stronger relationships among the generations, which provides for better mental and emotional health for everyone involved
- Games that utilize the language, such as Scrabble, promote better vocabulary and self-expression
Studies have shown that regularly playing games can greatly reduce a person’s chance of developing dementia.
Some games, particularly electronic games that require thought and complex strategy or decision-making, have actually been shown to reverse a cognitive functioning decline in many seniors. This gives family game night special meaning even beyond the memories and bonding.
Senior care can be a fantastic source of mental stimulation for your aging parent. Keeping their brain healthy and active supports better cognitive functioning, stronger memory skills, and reduced decline as they age. A senior home care services provider can help your parent to maintain their cognitive health in a variety of ways. This can include sharing conversation, talking about their lives and memories, enjoying playing games together, teaching each other favorite hobbies or pastimes, and heading out of the house to stay active together.
If you or an aging loved-one are considering hiring Home Care in Loudoun County, VA, please contact the caring staff at LivinRite Home Care. Call Us Today at (703) 634-9991.
Source:
Parentgiving.com
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