Stories Articles & Conversations
Long-form blogs, expert articles, and media — gentle, accurate ways to talk with children about Alzheimer's, dementia, and memory loss.
When a Parent Is Caregiving: Helping Kids Through the In-Between
When you're caring for a parent with dementia while raising children, everyone in the house feels the shift — and children often feel it most in the things nobody explains. Kids notice when you're distracted, when plans change last minute, when the phone rings and your face changes. The most helpful thing you can do is name what's happening in simple, honest terms, reassure them that they're still a priority, and protect small pockets of ordinary time together. You don't need to be less stretched. You just need your child to understand that the stretching isn't about them.
When Siblings React Differently: Supporting Each Child in Their Own Way
One child sobs, another shrugs and asks what's for dinner, a third starts acting out at school — and all three are responding normally to the same grandparent's dementia. Children process hard things through the lens of their age, temperament, and relationship with the person, which means siblings in one family can look like they're having entirely different experiences. They usually are. The most helpful thing a parent can do is resist comparing them, meet each child where they actually are, and trust that a quiet child isn't necessarily fine and a tearful one isn't necessarily struggling more.
12 Activities Kids and Grandparents With Dementia Can Still Enjoy Together
The best activities for a child and a grandparent with dementia share one design rule: **no memory required.** Anything that lives in the present moment - hands, senses, music, laughter - still works, often beautifully. Here are twelve that families come back to again and again, plus the three rules that make any of them succeed.
When It's Mom or Dad: Helping Children Through Young-Onset Dementia
Most of what families read about children and dementia assumes the person is a grandparent. But dementia sometimes arrives decades early - young-onset (or early-onset) dementia begins before 65, often in a person's 40s or 50s - and when it does, the child in the story isn't a visiting grandchild. It's a son or daughter living in the house, watching a parent change. Everything gets harder and closer: the conversations, the losses, the daily logistics, the child's own fears. It is also survivable, and children in these families can grow up connected and okay - but they need more honesty, more structure, and more support than the grandparent playbook provides.
Making a Memory Book With Your Child and Grandparent
A memory book - a simple scrapbook of photos, stories, and mementos built *with* a grandparent, not just about them - is quietly one of the best things a family facing dementia can make. For the grandparent, it's reminiscence therapy in disguise: old photographs unlock the long-term memories dementia touches last, and telling those stories is joyful, confidence-restoring work. For the child, it's a craft project that doubles as connection, a way to hear family stories while they can still be told. And for the family, it becomes both a care tool and an heirloom. Here's how to make one, step by step.
The Grief Nobody Names: Helping Children With Ambiguous Loss
There's a kind of grief that comes without a funeral, without casseroles, without anyone saying "I'm sorry for your loss" - because the person is still here. Psychologists call it *ambiguous loss*: mourning someone who is physically present but psychologically changing. Children living alongside a grandparent's dementia feel it acutely, and they almost never have words for it. Giving them those words - and permission to hold sadness and love at the same time - is one of the kindest things a parent can do.
Family Gatherings With a Grandparent With Dementia: A Gentle Planning Guide
Big family days - birthdays, holidays, reunions - are exactly the occasions when families most want Grandma there, and exactly the environments dementia handles worst: noise, crowds, broken routines, and a dozen conversations at once. The fix isn't excluding her, and it isn't pretending nothing has changed. It's designing the day differently: smaller doses, quieter corners, a familiar rhythm, and children who've been prepared for what they might see. Done that way, gatherings stop being something the family survives and go back to being something everyone - including Grandma - actually enjoys.
Why Picture Books Are the Best Tool for Talking About Memory Loss
Ask a child to talk about their grandmother's dementia and you'll often get a shrug. Read them a story about a rabbit whose grandpa forgets things, and the questions pour out. That's not a coincidence - it's how children's minds are built. Stories give children safe distance from big feelings, which is why picture books are one of the most powerful tools a family navigating memory loss can own. Psychologists call it bibliotherapy; children just call it a bedtime story.
"Will I Get It Too?" Answering Children's Fears About Dementia
When a grandparent has dementia, children often carry a quiet, frightened question: *Can I catch it? Will Mum or Dad get it? Will I?* These worries are extremely common, and children frequently don't voice them — they simply carry the fear silently. The good news is that the honest answers are reassuring: dementia is not contagious, a child cannot catch it, and it is overwhelmingly a condition of much older age that isn't going to happen to them as a child. Answering these fears gently and truthfully — ideally before a child even asks — lifts a real weight off small shoulders.
When Grandpa Seems Like a Different Person: Helping Kids With Personality Changes
One of the hardest parts of dementia for a child isn't forgetting — it's when a warm, familiar grandparent starts to seem like a different person. A gentle grandma who becomes irritable, a patient grandpa who gets suspicious or says hurtful things, a lively relative who goes quiet and distant. For a child, this can be more confusing and painful than memory loss, because it feels personal. The key is helping them understand that the sickness is changing how their grandparent acts, but it hasn't changed who their grandparent really is — or how much they're loved. The person is still there, underneath a brain that's struggling.
World Brain Day: Fun Ways to Teach Kids About Their Amazing Brain
World Brain Day (July 22) is a wonderful, upbeat chance to help children fall in love with the most amazing thing they own — their brain. You don't need to be a scientist or make it a lesson. With a few playful activities, kids can learn what their brain does, how to take care of it, and — gently — that brains can work differently in different people, which builds the kind of understanding and kindness that lasts a lifetime. It's a celebration, not a science class: the goal is wonder, not facts to memorize.
When Your Child Is Scared — or Doesn't Want to Visit
When a child is frightened of a grandparent with dementia, or flatly refuses to visit, it's a completely normal reaction — not bad behavior, and not a sign the relationship is broken. Something has changed in a person they love, and fear or reluctance is an honest response to that. The worst thing you can do is force it or shame it; the best is to get curious about the specific fear, take the pressure off, and rebuild connection in small, safe steps. Pushed, most children dig in. Met with patience, most come around — often more than you'd expect.
When Things Change: Talking to Children About the Later Stages of Dementia
As dementia progresses, children need honest, gentle updates rather than a single conversation that stands forever — and the guiding principle stays the same as it was at the beginning: tell the truth in words that fit their age, don't promise what you can't, and keep pointing to what remains. Children cope far better with a hard truth they understand than with a change nobody explains. And even in the later stages, when speech and recognition fade, connection is still possible through touch, voice, and presence — which is often the most comforting thing a child can learn.
Staying Close From Far Away: Long-Distance Connection When a Grandparent Has Dementia
When a grandparent with dementia lives far away, meaningful connection is still absolutely possible — it just looks different from a visit. Video calls can be wonderful or confusing depending on the person and the day, so the most reliable approach is to send things that live in their world: a card in the mail, a drawing on the wall, a recorded song, a photo they can hold. Keep it short, warm, and repeatable, and don't measure success by whether they know who's calling. Presence can be delivered by post, and love travels perfectly well across a distance.
Summer Activities Kids and Grandparents With Dementia Can Share
Summer is full of simple, sensory pleasures — and those are exactly the kinds of moments a child and a grandparent with dementia can still share beautifully. When memory is changing, the best activities aren't elaborate outings but small, gentle, feel-good experiences: the warmth of the sun, the taste of ice cream, the smell of a garden, a familiar song drifting across the porch.
Making a Memory Book With Your Child for a Grandparent With Dementia
A memory book is one of the simplest, most loving things a child can make for a grandparent with dementia — a small album of photos and stories that helps their loved one reminisce, feel calm, and connect, while giving the child a meaningful way to help. You don't need to be crafty or spend money.
The Longest Day, Together: A Family Activity Kids Can Be Part Of
The Longest Day — the summer solstice, the day with the most light — is one of the loveliest ways for a whole family, children included, to honor someone they love who's living with dementia.
Teaching Empathy Through Story: Dementia and SEL in the Early Classroom
Story is one of the most powerful tools we have for teaching young children empathy — and a gentle story about a grandparent whose memory is changing can build perspective-taking, compassion, and emotional vocabulary in ways a worksheet never could.
A Father's Day for Changing Memories: Helping Kids Celebrate Grandpa
When a father or grandfather is living with dementia, Father's Day can feel bittersweet — but it can still be tender, joyful, and deeply connecting if you let go of the big-celebration script and lean into small, sensory moments instead.
Visiting a Grandparent in Memory Care: A Family's Gentle Guide
Taking a child to visit a grandparent in memory care can be one of the most loving things a family does — and it goes best when you prepare a little, keep it short and sensory, and let go of the idea that it has to look a certain way.
When a Grandparent Forgets Your Child's Name: Gentle Things to Say
When a grandparent with dementia forgets your child's name, the kindest thing you can do is name the feeling and protect the bond: let your child know it's okay to feel sad or confused, that Grandma's brain is sick and it isn't anyone's fault, and that the love between them is still completely real — even when the name slips away.
Children's Books That Gently Explain Memory Loss and Dementia
A good picture book can do something a careful explanation often can't: it lets a child meet a hard, abstract idea safely, through a character, with a parent close by.
How Do You Explain Dementia to a Child?
The simplest way to explain dementia to a child is to be honest, gentle, and concrete: a person's brain is getting sick in a way that makes it hard to remember things and sometimes makes them act differently — but it isn't anyone's fault, it isn't catching, and the love between them doesn't go away.
What Alzheimer's & Brain Awareness Month Means for Families With Young Children
June is Alzheimer's & Brain Awareness Month — a month set aside, since 2014, to talk openly about the brain, about dementia, and about the families living alongside it. For households with young children, it's a gentle invitation: a natural, low-pressure moment to begin the kinds of conversations that are far easier to start before they feel urgent. You don't need to turn it into a lesson.