Senior Housing Touring Tips 1 & 2

If you're on a mission to find the right senior living community for your parents, you've come to the right place. Our Aging Wisdom logo is a ginkgo biloba leaf, an ancient symbol of wisdom and resilience in aging. The ginkgo is also a symbol of strength, hope, and peace. We understand how important it is to come to a place of strength, hope, and peace.

This journey is often one filled with mixed emotions and occasional self-doubt, and it's not unusual to feel guilty and stressed in the process. There are so many choices, and it can quickly become overwhelming. We meet families eager to sign the dotted line on a community before understanding how to find the best fit. We want to help you cut through the clutter and build confidence as you grow in your understanding of the many housing options in the marketplace and how best to support your parents in these important decisions. 

In this series, we'll provide tips for your tours and explain the process of identifying a senior care community that is the right fit for your loved one at this time. We're here to save you time and money and provide you with the tools to not get hooked in by the “chandelier effect.” And there’s the emotional aspect of moving a parent; there's guilt, there's overwhelm, there's stress, and anxiety about making the right decision.

Our goal is to provide you with information that will help bring you hope, peace, and strength.

Over this series of podcast episodes, we will be sharing our Top 10 Touring Tips.

Touring Tip 1: Tour without your parents.
Community tours can be long, up to two hours. And you'll be flooded with lots of information. By the time you leave, you'll be exhausted.

And if you have a list of three to five communities to explore, that's a lot of time and energy. So we strongly encourage you to take those initial tours on your own. That way you can have a thorough tour, checking off the ideas that we're sharing with you today, and asking a lot of questions.

Most importantly, narrowing the choices down to your top one or two will help when you take your parent/s on tour, making it far less overwhelming for them. You can also make those tours with your parents more succinct tours -- we suggest 45 minutes to an hour, maybe an hour and a half if you're having a meal at the community.

Touring Tip 2:  Tour at mealtime.
When touring with your parent, it's a great chance to incorporate a meal during your tour and the communities love to show off their food and have you experience their dining room.

A meal offers a number of advantages. Primarily, it’s an opportunity to see many of the residents together in one place. If you tour during non-mealtime hours, residents will likely be in their apartments or spread out across other parts of the community.

Look around and ask yourself, are these your parents' people? Can you picture them eating with these residents, becoming friends with these residents?  The dining room is important for social engagement as well as for the enjoyment of the food and the dining experience itself.

Join us for future episodes of Wisdom Wednesday where we’ll share more Touring Tips.

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