Technology and the Elderly

There are times that it can be excruciatingly painful to help your parents deal with technology and the Internet. Sometimes all it takes is for them to push the mouse around and you’re a little kid again frustrated and not understood. As you well know, it doesn’t take much for parents to tick you off, but you know what they say, a chip off the old block.

It is difficult to help them with any type of technologic problem when you’re being short. Just with any skill or ability that you know second hand, it can be increasingly frustrating to teach someone who absolutely has no clue on what to do. Here is some advice and some tips that can help you when teaching someone much older than yourself.

* Do no harm. It may be tempting to tweak and moderate their computer so it runs more like yours but there is one rule of thumb for that. Don’t. Though their ways or how their setup for their desktop are different than yours, they may already be accustomed doing it that way, it’s their computer not yours. Just let them work the computer the way they want to, even if it means that you have to learn a whole different setup.

*Pay Attention and Learn. Your parents most likely do the pretty much the same things with the desktop or the Web that you do but in a different fashion not to mention they may call everything something completely inaccurate. MS Word could be called “Microsoft” or perhaps something that existed decades ago (like every gaming console is referred to as the “nintendo”). Don’t correct them because in the end it really doesn’t matter. Just use the same words they do and don’t try to correct them, because they really don’t care.

*Also don’t believe that you’re better than them at the computer. Your age doesn’t matter when working with technology, it is not a handicap. You may be surprised how good a pediatrition is with IMing, Photoshop, photo sharing, or the game Age of Empires III. Time makes people stubborn, they are always willing to learn more things. Take some time and look on the other side of the looking glass to gain a perspective on what it is like for them to run something they aren’t quite familiar with.

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