How To Encourage Safer Sex When Your Senior Goes To A Retirement Home
by Tony Grant
Assisted living facilities are excellent opportunities for seniors because they allow them to talk to people their own age and reminisce about the time periods that they shared. It also can allow more intimate relationships to form. However, due to the fact that all seniors do not have worry about getting pregnant since they have already gone through menopause, they also tend to ignore the rules about practicing safe sex. This has lead to an increase in the number of seniors who are suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs.
If you are worried about your senior, here are some tips to make sure that he or she is encouraged to use safer practices when having sex.
1. Have the Conversation
It might be weird to tell someone that is so much older than you about safe sex. However, this conversation is necessary in order to make sure that your senior does not inadvertently shorten his or her own life. You need to start a conversation with your senior before he or she leaves about the potential dangers that he or she might be facing.
You also need to get a decent read on how much information your senior actually has about safe sex practices and whether or not this information is true. Sex education was not highly regulated before the AIDS crisis, so there's a chance that your senior may have been gravely misinformed during his or her life.
Before you allow your senior to go to a retirement home, you need to make sure that he or she understands that STDs are still a danger and that male condoms are the only way to prevent them.
2. Pack Condoms
Next, you are going to need to get a large supply of male condoms to send with your senior, regardless of his or her gender. This will allow you to give your senior all of the tools that he or she needs in order to make sure that he or she is having safe sex. If you give your senior condoms, then you are essentially taking away any excuse to not be safe.
If your senior is particularly religious, then you need to make a judgment call regarding whether or not he or she is too religious for having sex to be a danger. You might need to sneak the condoms into his or her bag while going through the packing process.
For more information, talk to a retirement community like Heritage Commons.
Share
About Me
When you're facing putting your loved one into a nursing home or assisted living facility, you want to make the best possible choice for your loved one. That can be difficult when you don't know much about the nursing homes in your area, or about what you should be looking for in a nursing home to begin with. It's a good idea to tour as many facilities in your area as possible to get an idea of which ones you like, but you still need to know what the signs of a good or bad nursing home are. I used to work as a kitchen assistant in long term care facilities, and I learned a lot about them during that time. I started this blog to share some of my insights into what makes a nursing home great, and how to spot problems in a facility that you're considering.