Stimulating Your Parent's Mind Cooking Dinner Together for National Pasta Day

By Andy Niska | October 18, 2018 |

October 25th is National Pasta Day. As a family caregiver, you know how important it is to make sure your parent eats a healthy, balanced diet with a variety of nutritious, satisfying foods. What they eat contributes dramatically to their physical functioning, as well as how they feel. This is not the only way that your senior’s meals can impact their life, however. The actual act of cooking can be a critical contributor to their well-being, and even their cognitive functioning. Cooking dinner together can be a valuable way to spend quality time together, and also to help your parent maintain stronger cognitive functioning, sharper memory, and improved mental and emotional health. National Pasta Day is the ideal opportunity to get into the kitchen together to prepare a meal, and then enjoy time together with the entire family eating together.

Home Care in Liberty Lake WA: Cooking Dinner Together

Some ways of cooking together can stimulate your mind include:

Encouraging them to talk and interact, which provides social stimulation.
Encouraging them to share memories about the types of food you are preparing, which stimulates their memory, and can sharpen both memory recall and retention.
Following through with instructions such as reading and completing a recipe helps to keep their mind active, and encourage faster, more reliable cognitive processing.
Practicing basic skills such as measuring keeps various areas of the brain active and sharp, which can help to slow cognitive functioning decline.
Spending this time together helps to keep your parent-child relationship stronger, which can make them more receptive to care and reduce stress for both of you.
Encouraging them to share family recipes, or recipes they prepared for you when you were younger provides a sense of importance and relevance that reduces depression, and boosts motivation. This is also meaningful for you, helping to create a stronger link and increasing meaning in your care relationship.

Getting into the kitchen with your senior and cooking together is just one of the ways home care can benefit them on a regular basis. An in-home senior care services provider can help your parent to continue cooking for themselves, make good nutritional choices, and enjoy mental stimulation through preparing meals and snacks together. This care provider can also provide further companionship and support, and activities to keep your parent’s mental emotional health high, encourage physical health, and help them to enjoy a higher quality of life as they age. As their family caregiver, this can give you confidence that your parent is getting everything they need both when you are with them and when you are not.

If you or an aging loved one are considering home care in Liberty Lake, WA, please contact the friendly staff at Love at Home Senior Care, today. Call (509) 204-4088

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Andy Niska

Owner at Love In Home Senior Care

Andy has over 20+ years experience in the medical community and has a true compassion for seniors. With a degree in Health Care Administration, he developed a background in a variety of health care services that only comes from first hand experience. While working as a manager of a large clinic and as an account executive for medical suppliers. Andy has built valuable relationships with the medical community.

His role in Love In Home Senior Care is to educate people on what care choice is the best fit for the senior and their family while attempting to make this decision as stress-free as possible for everyone involved.

This decision making process should be smooth and stress free for everyone, including all family members and their loved ones. Having access to people with experience (like the team at Love In Home Senior Care) to assist you along the way can help this process. With an extensive background in health care, Andy has the experience needed to guide and direct your loved one to the choice that is the best fit.