Home Care Tips: Using Color to Add Structure to Your Parents’ Day

Home Care in Needham, MA

Color is an extremely powerful thing. While most people take it for granted, something as simple as the color of clothing that you choose to wear or how you decorate your bedroom can make a tremendous difference in how you feel and how your day progresses. Harnessing these incredible effects can help you and your senior’s non-medical in-home caregiver bring structure, meaning, and other benefits to the care plan for your seniors.

Some of the ways that you can add structure to your parents’ day through the use of color include:

• Clothing. Whether the non-medical in-home caregiver wears a specific uniform on a regular basis or has more flexibility in terms of what he or she is wearing, their clothing and accessories can make an impact on how your parents perceive them and what they can expect from their day. If he or she is coming to the home to care for your parents first thing in the morning, for example, wearing bright colors and bold patterns stimulates the mind, boosts energy, and creates a sense of activity and engagement that will help your parents get up, get active, and stay focused. For evening and night care, calm, soothing colors such as white, pale blue, or light pink soothe and quiet the mind, create a sense of comfort, and foster relaxation for a care experience that will ease your parents into relaxation and sleep.
• Tableware. For seniors who deal with suppressed appetite, colors such as orange and red stimulate the desire to eat and encourage your senior to eat more. Colored tableware can also be extremely useful for seniors with low vision or cognitive complications that make it more difficult for them to see their food or recognize what to eat. Many experts recommend blue plates to bring focus and attention to food and help seniors recognize their food more easily.
• Warning labels. At a very young age, people learn to associate specific colors with social cues. Green means “go” or that something is good, while red means “stop” or that something is not good or hot. Yellow means to take caution, blue means cold or that something is for a boy, and pink means something is for a girl. Even seniors coping with the cognitive challenges, confusion, and memory loss of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia often retain their ability to recognize colors and their meanings. A non-medical in-home caregiver can use these colors to create cues throughout the home during the day so that your parents can maintain a sense of independence and autonomy, as well as stay safer. For example, he or she may put a piece of blue tape on the cold water handle and a piece of red tape on the hot water handle, or label towels, toothbrushes, and other items with colors that indicate whether something belongs to your mother or father.