Rainy Day Activities: Interview Your Elderly Loved One

Home Care in Wayland MA

If your family doesn’t have a lot of written records, it might be time to start some. One way to do this is to interview different family members, starting with your elderly loved one. This is a great activity when you’re trapped inside by weather since you don’t need any special equipment to get started.

Why You Should Interview Your Loved One

One of the things that family members tend to regret most after losing a loved one is losing the stories that loved one could have told. As busy humans, we get so bogged down in the day-to-day of living our lives that we often forget to find a way to preserve those memories. Setting up a series of informal interviews with your elderly loved one gives you a way to capture those tales from years gone by and add them to the family history for future generations to discover.

What Kinds of Questions to Ask

You may think that you know an awful lot about your loved one and that might be true, but you’d also be surprised at what you don’t know. So start at the beginning. Do you know where your loved one was born? How about any funny or interesting stories about your loved one’s birth or childhood? Start a conversations and see where the information takes you. Some other topics you can ask about include:

• Family traditions
• Where your loved one grew up
• What kind of child, teenager, or young adult your loved one was
• What the world was like when your loved one was growing up
• How did your loved one know what profession to join
• How did your loved one meet a spouse
• What were his own children like and how did it differ from his own childhood
• Family recipes
• Accomplishments
• Regrets

This list is not exhaustive, and a lot of what you might ask your loved one hinges on what she has to share with you throughout the interview process. Stay open to the conversation and where your loved one wants to take it.

Preserving the Answers

There are so many ways for you to capture an interview with your loved one. You could film the questions and answers or even use a digital tape recorder. You might want to write the answers down or maybe your loved one wants to write the answers instead of talking about the answers. How you record the interview isn’t as important as the information you can glean from opening the dialogue with your loved one.

Source
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-a-pillemer-phd/listening-to-elders_b_4200329.html
http://www.educationworld.com/a_tsl/archives/04-1/lesson011.shtml
https://www.agingcare.com/Articles/questions-to-ask-elderly-parents-147907.htm