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There is always a desire to reciprocate all the love and sacrifice your parents have given through the years. Treating them with respect and making them feel honored is one of the best ways to achieve this. But how can you show respect to your elderly as an adult child?
One way of showing respect to your parents is to communicate with them openly and mindfully. Communication helps your parents open up and reduce the stress and anxiety that comes with aging. When communicating, you should practice empathy, patience, and compassion to create a safe place for them.
If you want to find other ways to show respect for elderly parents, keep reading to discover nine of the most efficient approaches.
1. Communicate Openly But Mindfully
Open lines of communication with the elderly come with many mental and psychological benefits. According to Susan Pinker, a psychologist, having open communication with the elderly can reduce stress, depression, and anxiety and improve physical health.
However, communicating with seniors, especially those with health conditions that make communication hard, can be daunting.
To avoid constant friction, you’ll need to create a strategy of connecting with your parents to ensure mutual understanding and smooth interaction. When having conversations, you should get rid of all distractions such as TV and mobile phones to give them your undivided attention.
Above all, practice empathy, patience, and compassion. Give your elderly parents plenty of time to listen, process, and respond to you.
Other tips that can help you overcome communication hurdles with your elderly parents include:
- Practice active listening: Healthy communication requires you to be actively present. To show your loved one you’re attentive, you should use body cues such as eye contact, angling your body towards them, and rubbing their hands or shoulders to comfort them.
- Speak clearly: You should use simple language and speak audibly to help your elderly process your information fast. Bring up one idea at a time and rephrase your points if they fail to grasp what you’re saying.
- Refrain from giving advice: Unless your elderly parents have requested your advice, you should leave the role to an outside neutral party.
Starting a conversation with elderly parents might be challenging. I recommend reading my guide to learn how to do it. How to Start Conversations With Your Elderly Parents
2. Allow Them To Live Independently
For seniors, independence and autonomy are twofold. It is the only thing they can control as age takes over their mental and physical health. Sadly, most older children deprive seniors of this privilege. They manage their parents’ daily choices, finances, property, where they should live, and with whom.
Though sometimes health issues that come with age may necessitate you stepping up, healthy seniors should enjoy some degree of freedom. Research involving 450 elderly parents from 24 countries shows that the freedom to decide for themselves would make seniors feel respected.
So, you should seek to encourage your elderly parent’s independent living. It comes with the following benefits:
- It aids with memory skills: Although the brain wears off gradually with age, mental activity boosts blood flow, which helps preserve memory.
- It gives them a feeling of control: Being able to make daily choices without the influence or control of other people gives elders a sense of purpose and self-worth, increasing their mental and physical well-being.
- It helps them to maintain balance: Loss of body strength makes seniors unable to stay active for long. Independence enables them to balance rest, interactions, and other activities.
If you think your elderly parents can’t live alone anymore, you should talk to them honestly and respectfully. Read my guide to learn how to speak to them about their safety, pay attention to their needs and wishes, and give them logical recommendations. How to Tell an Elderly Parent That They Can’t Live Alone
3. Celebrate Their Milestone and Achievements
When it comes to celebrating milestones and achievements, there’s no age limit. Recognizing all the little and big things your seniors have achieved through the years can make their retirement more fulfilling. All special occasions, such as birthdays, anniversaries, Father’s and Mother’s day, should be a reason for holding celebrations in honor of your parents.
Celebrating with the elderly is essential because:
- It provides them a sense of belonging: Most seniors fall victim to feeling lonely and isolated. However, celebrating special occasions can give them a sense of belonging, love, safety, and support. Even if you can’t be there in person, calling or sending cards and gifts can make them feel appreciated and respected.
- It makes them happy and fulfilled: According to a Harvard study, the happiest and most fulfilled seniors are not those with more money or success. It is those who have strong social connections and interactions with friends and family.
- It gives them something to anticipate: Looking forward to family events improves the senior’s mood and gives them a sense of involvement and purpose.
- It gives them a chance to reflect: Celebrating occasions recreates old memories that help the elders create a connection between their past and present. This makes it possible for them to maintain a sense of identity.
4. Spend Quality Time With Them
The most invaluable way of showing your parents respect is spending quality time with them despite having a busy schedule. Your presence is incomparable to any expensive gift you might deliver in person or through the mailbox. It lightens their mood and gives them an outlet for their worries and anxieties.
It might be logical to spend quality time daily, but whenever you get the chance, you should make it count by engaging in activities that would allow bonding. Some of the ways of spending quality time with your seniors include:
- Cooking meals: The kitchen is the heart of every home. It triggers the sense of smell linked to memories encouraging you to have meaningful conversations about the past. It boosts your senior’s emotions and gives them a sense of connection to the roles and responsibilities they used to play in the family.
- Going through photo albums: Family photos give many seniors nostalgia and familiarity. It allows them to reminisce on good times and challenging times they overcame.
- Going for a nature walk: Research at the University of Minnesota shows that seniors who spend more time in green and blue outdoor areas have increased mental and physical activity. It protects them from cognitive decline, immobility, and dementia.
- Teach them to use new technology: Seniors will always be fascinated by how much technology has evolved. Keeping them updated can help them use technological devices to socialize and call for help in emergencies.
5. Acknowledge Their Presence
Acknowledging your parents shows you value and honor them. It makes them feel respected, seen, heard, and understood. It also validates their existence by encouraging them to continue being diligent and doing good deeds. You can acknowledge your elderly in the following ways:
- Complementing them: Thoughtful and genuine complementing improves their self-esteem and self-confidence and how they relate and interact.
- Saying thank you: Whenever your elderly do or say something kind, supportive, and helpful, you should thank them privately or publicly.
- Listening to them: Most seniors feel as though they’re not adequate or like they don’t matter to those around them. Giving them a chance to speak and paying attention can remind them of the legacy they hold in your life.
- Recognizing their emotions: Aging makes seniors’ emotions more fragile, which makes it necessary to acknowledge how situations make them feel. This keeps them connected and gives them a sense of belonging.
6. Respect Their Personal Space
Getting old does not make the personal bubble disappear. The elderly, like you, need space and privacy to reflect, rest and recharge. The seniors also want to maintain control over their belongings such as money, house, and clothes.
Respecting their personal space can help reduce stress and information overload from their surroundings and help them stay focused on what matters in their golden years.
Some of the ways you can respect your elderly parent’s personal space include:
- Give them a private room: Unless constant care is necessary, your seniors deserve to have their own space. It would be unfair for them to spend their entire adult life having privacy only to lose it in their old age.
- Knock before entering the room: Never storm into your elderly parent’s room without knocking on the door, as it would violate their privacy. But if you knock severally with no response, you can tell them you intend to open the door to ensure they are okay.
- Allow them to finish tasks at their pace: Your senior will need more time to get through a task, but it doesn’t mean it’s challenging. Jumping in to help without permission can be disrespectful. You should be patient and supportive of letting them work at their speed.
- Respect their decisions and wishes: Wanting to be part of the major decisions of your seniors is natural. However, knowing your place and respecting their choices is crucial.
7. Show Appreciation for Their Advice
With age comes wisdom, experience, and important lessons learned through making mistakes. Making your parents your go-to place for life advice can give them a sense of purpose and open opportunities for creating a deep connection.
Sociology research from the University of Toronto shows that seniors who advise more people, including family and friends, find their life more meaningful than those with zero or fewer advice-giving opportunities.
To help you get the best out of your senior’s advice, you should do the following:
- Provide relevant background information, specific details, and realistic guardrails to keep the conversation interesting.
- Be open-minded about what your senior offers. Your point of view of your situation might differ from your senior’s. But your goal should be to listen throughout and make a judgment later.
- Ask questions to help you engage and get into the details of their perception. It might help you see your situation from another angle.
- Thank them for their time and words of wisdom. You can hug them, rub their back, or shake their hands.
8. Invest in Caregiving Services
Inevitably, the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage with age causes gradual mental and physical decline. It weakens the immune system, leaving the senior susceptible to acute and chronic illnesses such as:
- Diabetes
- Depression and dementia
- Hearing loss
- Osteoarthritis and back and neck pain
- Heart diseases
Moreover, old age brings complex health conditions referred to as geriatric syndromes, which result in underlying complications such as urinary incontinence, falls, and frailty.
During this time, your physical and financial support would go a long way in ensuring your senior has a comfortable life. You can show support by catering for the following costs:
- Doctor and nursing care: You can hire a doctor or a nurse to visit your senior regularly to measure vital signs and diagnose and treat diseases.
- Physical therapy: After an injury or an illness, your senior might need to relearn how to perform daily tasks like showering, eating, and dressing. You can hire a physiotherapist to help them enhance a range of motions and functionalities and strengthen joints and muscles.
- Nutrition care: Due to a weakened immune system, seniors require a special diet to boost the body’s functionality. You can hire a dietician to prepare a meal plan ideal for your loved one’s needs.
- Homemaker care: This involves assistance with household chores such as cleaning, cooking, shopping, and organizing the house.
9. Be the Bigger Person in Case of Arguments
If you’re the primary caregiver of your senior parent, arguments, and disagreements will surface along the way because of spending so much time together. Some will be minor, while others will be bigger, hinting at major underlying issues between you.
An argumentative environment is toxic and might hinder you from dispensing quality care to your elderly. On the other hand, it might impact your senior’s health adversely, causing them stress and anxiety. You should always be prepared to handle conflicts respectfully and step down when necessary.
Some of the tactics you can use to prevent arguments from escalating include:
- Apply reflexive listening: This communication strategy involves repeating what your senior says and offering an additional resolution. It helps de-escalate arguments and to make them feel understood.
- Take a neutral stand on sensitive issues: Instead of being confrontational, you should choose an unbiased approach when talking your seniors into making changes to things that matter to them.
- Diffuse with distractions: When you notice a potential argument, you should pivot to calming activities to enhance your parent’s mood.
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