Adult children often move their aging parent into their homes out of safety concerns for them living alone, especially where some type of health condition is an issue and/or to ensure that loneliness does not become an issue for them. These adult children now become caretakers to their elderly family member and are often not trained or prepared to deal with the challenges associated with their newly acquired caretaker duties.
One of the challenges they often encounter is elderly toileting issues. In particular, when that aging parent is a father, whether they’re able to sit on the toilet or bedside toilet with or without assistance, they will eventually (and often) experience the situation of peeing through the toilet seat gap. This results in urine puddles on the floor and urine-stained clothes, which need to be cleaned up. This also could have a devastating effect on the elderly parent due to the embarrassment of wetting their clothes, peeing on the floor and having their ‘kids” clean up after them. Along with the embarrassment, they could experience a sense of loss of dignity and confidence, which could also lead to isolation and depression.
While urinary incontinence is a much broader issue that can occur with an aging parent as well, there are several products available that can address the unpredictability of where/when an incident could occur. For the adult child caregiver benefiting from their parent using these products and believing that getting their parent to the toilet would also be a worry-free experience, only to have to continually clean up after a pee-through-the-gap type of accident can be frustrating as well; possibly giving rise to anger which, in turn, can have a negative effect on their elderly parent’s emotional wellbeing.
There is definitely a need for a product that:
- avoids the domino effect of emotional frustrations that come with adult caretaker children having to constantly clean up their elderly parent’s urine mishaps; and
- avoids the elderly parent’s embarrassment over this type of urine mishap and preserves their dignity and self-confidence.
The P-flector® is that type of product. Using a P-flector® urine deflector keeps aging parents from peeing through the toilet seat gap and reduces the need for, and frustration (and potential anger) associated with adult child caregivers continuously cleaning up the resulting mess. It also reduces the parent’s embarrassment, increase their confidence, and can help restore their sense of dignity.