Home Care Tips: Encouraging Your Parents to Learn New Things with a Learning Journal

Home Care in Natick, MA

The human mind has an incredible capacity to learn, and as long as you keep giving it new things to process and remember, it will likely stay strong and sharp. Learning something new every day helps your elderly loved ones maintain their mental and emotional health, and can even be beneficial in warding off Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia, and slowing their progression if they do develop. Encouraging your parents to learn new things can be a fantastic way for their non-medical caregiver to enhance their home care plan, support ongoing mental health and well-being, and encourage lifelong curiosity and learning.

While learning new things is as simple as watching educational programming or doing Internet research, providing some structure to their learning can help your elderly loved ones focus on what they would like to learn as well as what they have already learned so that they can review, share, and explore it further later.

Your parents’ learning journal can be anything from a simple spiral notebook or composition book to something more elaborate such as a leather-bound journal or even a book that they make themselves. Using recycled paper and a corrugated cardboard cover to create their own journal is a fun and mentally stimulating activity that is an activity all its own.

How your parents use their learning journal is up to them, but use these ideas to help guide them and their non-medical caregiver to enrich their care journey with learning:

Learning Goals

Set aside part of their journal for your parents to record things that they would like to learn. These can be lifelong learning goals such as how to do a particular skill, how something is made, or the history of a particular period or event. This section can also be where your parents jot down things that interest them during the day that they would like to learn more about.

New Things

Make a portion of the journal specifically for the new things that your aging loved ones learn from day to day. Have them put the date at the top of the page and write down new words, ideas, or facts that they pick up throughout the day.

Investigations

When your parents and their non-medical caregiver embark on a journey to fulfill one of their learning goals, have them include this investigation in their learning journal. They should write down what they want to learn, how they are going to go about learning it, and what they learn.

In addition to the benefits that a learning journal offers your parents, this journal is also a fantastic way for you to engage yourself further in their care. By reviewing what they include in their journal you can find things to talk to them about and feel more confident they are getting the level of care, assistance, and engagement they deserve.