Silver Planet™ Help Your Parents Age in Place.

Many older people have a long-term distrust of banks and often hide their valuables in the strangest places. If your parents are European immigrants, they have an even greater tendency to do this, and if either parent has dementia or Alzheimer’s, they likely have hidden things and forgotten about them.

Many seniors hide money and valuables that often go unnoticed in the liquidation of their estates. Here are the most common places where these valuables may be found:

There's no such thing as bad publicity. This study is being reprinted on every Web site that has even a remote connection to boomers, seniors, or game playing or that is suffering from a slow news day.

Many of us will gather with close family at Christmas and/or New Year’s. You may want to observe your parents, or other close relatives, and note any new signs of the aging process.

Some of these signs, if occurring infrequently, are no cause for panic; however, they could mean that your parents need to have someone check on them daily or consider assisted living.

For the past couple of months, I have seen my mom decline physically and cognitively. She has lost weight and seems almost unresponsive to voice. My family and I ate Thanksgiving dinner at her assisted living, and though she ate rather continually, she was silent and noncommunicative. I thought it was getting closer to the end.

Sexual abuse is any sexual contact without consent of both people. Sexual abuse may also include indecent exposure, sexual harassment, incest, and unwanted viewing of pornography. Here are some indicators:    

Tips to enjoy the season with your old, frail, possibly demented family member are easy to find on the Internet. Just type “ caregiver holiday tips” into your search engine, and a long list of Web site options will be displayed on your screen.

While I have tremendous respect for anyone who develops a holiday tip list, I find that many of those tips don’t apply to my situation. My mother lives in a dementia-oriented assisted living center in Seattle and may not have far to go.

Assisted living regulations require that residents’ clothing be washed in very hot soapy water and dried in very hot dryers. As a result, clothing gets really beaten up and wears out fast. 

After a year at Gaffney House, my mother needed some new clothes, so I thought we would go shopping.

Music therapy on iPods: Let's start with a quote from today's Wall Street Journal article, which gets right to the point: "Ann Povodator, an 85-year-old Alzheimer's patient in Boynton Beach, Fla., listens to her beloved opera and Yiddish songs every day on an iPod with her home health aide or her daughter when she comes to visit. ‘We listen for at least a half-hour, and we talk afterwards,’ says her daughter, Marilyn Povodator.

Here’s the truth about cars: As a society, we're not getting any younger. And our driving is going to imperil us, sooner or later, as this Times article painfully illustrates. On the positive side, older drivers are not responsible for the bulk of traffic accidents—adults age 20-34 have that distinction—and they experience fewer fatal crashes per licensed driver. That's the good news.

I tend not to write about gadgets, but the TV remote has bugged me for a while. Since the analog-digital switch, my mother-in-law struggles to use the remote control of her new digital TV. Sometimes she "gets it" by reading printed directions. Sometimes she just yanks the cord out of the wall to turn off the set. Somehow, I don't think she is the only one who used to have an older-style “dial” TV that you walked up to and switched on/off. From an email I received recently: "When we gave the new TV to my husband's mother, she said, ‘What 's with all the buttons?