Often children feel guilty after moving their parents to retirement communities; it’s usually a trying time for children who are endeared to their parents. Normally, you feel an amount of guilt, but it doesn’t mean you did the wrong thing. Here are three things to help you cope with the guilty burden of moving your parents to a retirement community:
Knowing You Did The Right Thing
You must come to terms with the fact that you placed your parents in the right place. It takes special attention to care for a loved one, and even more when memory care is involved. By placing your parents in a retirement home, you entrust your parents into the trusted hands of skilled caregivers. In addition, retirement homes are well-designed with amenities to meet your parents’ needs.
Retirement communities are well equipped, even more than your home. The social interaction required by elderlies is seldom provided at the children’s home, adequate exercise facilities are often lacking, serene environments are often missing, and specialized medical care isn’t readily available. These amenities are important for parents, and chances are that you are lacking them. When you consider such factors, it helps in reminding yourself that you did the right thing
Call Your Parents Regularly
Regularly speaking with your parents will reassure you that they’re faring well. Visits may be limited to specific days of the week, which may come as a heartbreak for several children. Calling and discussing with your parents in their retirement homes will reduce the feeling of guilt. In fact, hearing from them may become a stress reliever for you.
Aside from relieving the guilt of putting your parents in a retirement home, looking forward to speaking with your parents (regularly) will leave you feeling better after the call. It’s pretty similar to how we anticipate and enjoy a beautiful shower at the end of a hectic day.
Plan to Visit Them
One bad habit of dealing with guilt, that some people have, is avoidance. The guilt after moving a parent to a retirement community comes from the feeling of abandonment. As ironic as it might sound to people who haven’t experienced it, children who experience this guilt sometimes feel too guilty to visit their parents.
Questions on how your parents would react to you can get overwhelming. This is where calling regularly helps. Plan to visit your parents, and tell them about it. Bring something they may not have at the retirement home they would enjoy; a special sandwich, for instance.
In planning your visits, involve others too. Look for times when their grandchildren (if any) can accompany you. Go with their close friends, go with games your parents enjoy. The important lesson is to plan the visit. Don’t look at it as a dire obligation, rather another opportunity to spend quality physical time with a loved one in a place helping them.
In conclusion, moving parents to a retirement community can be saddening. Often, a guilty burden follows suit, overwhelming the real reason you moved them to a retirement home altogether. By reminding yourself that you made the right decision and constantly staying in touch physically and through calls, you can overcome the guilt.
