AIBU to think care homes need more age-appropriate entertainment?

you may have already answered how they do this, but I'm placemarking.

Personally, I don't want most things that are considered entertainment. I want nice places to sit in well decorated spaces with lovely views and a good dining area, and then a very nice personal room with bathroom and kitchenette.

Hmm, my dad was in a care home and it wasn’t like that. They had an Elvis impersonator (which my dad loved) and various singers visit who sang 60s / 70s stuff. They had an ABBA tribute band play, and a folky type guy who did Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell songs etc. The music they had on in the background in the lounges etc during the day was usually the kind of thing you’d get on Radio 2 or Heart or Hits Radio I think. Or residents would sometimes request things they liked - my dad was a big fan of Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, jazz singers like Stacey Kent and Jamie Cullum etc and they used to play stuff like that for him. He also had an Echo Dot in his room and we wrote down all the music he liked so the care workers could ask Alexa to play things for him if he was struggling to remember / articulate the names himself. (He didn’t have dementia but he struggled with speech sometimes and his medication meant his recall was slow.)

My Nan was born 1925, was 20 at the end of the war. She went to dances with American GIs & all the teenagers liked swing / big band music like Glenn Miller; she said Vera Lynn was for ‘older people’ & ‘too boring’ !! She’d have been 101 this month if was still alive. She lived to 91 & liked random stuff especially Westlife & Engelbert Humperdinck.

😆 Music and lots of “medication”.

Meatloaf and Blondie for me. And some noise cancelling earbuds so I don't have to listen to some of the other stuff some of you have listed 😁

It's not just care homes. I attended a chair exercise class for old people and what was the music played? Michael sodding Buble - which I know about because a contestant on Come Dine With Me was a Michael Buble tribute act. When the third track began I couldn't take any more and left. The residents in care homes can't just up and leave of course.

I’m honestly quite shocked by this. I visited a care home 15 years ago and they were in the process of updating their WW2 era decoration and activities because they were aware it was becoming increasingly irrelevant to their clientele. Maybe location is pertinent to an extent as this was in an area with lower life expectancy than somewhere with a wealthier population where people tend to live longer but even so there must be very, very few people alive for whom WW2 forms a significant part of their experience.

I work as a cook in a care home we have lots of different music we have ABBA days where all the staff dress up , Rock and Roll days , different activities, exercises, residents help choose the menus. We do celebrate VE Day because our residents want to. They also love karaoke because even with dementia they remember the words to their favourite music

Yes I totally agree. They should consult the residents on the type of entertainment they would like and they might be surprised. My dear mum wasn’t in a home (she died last year) but I know if she had been she’d have wanted to listen Ed Sheeran, dance to T-Rex AND the Zutons Valerie, do some choral singing, bake and watch reality TV ❤️

I agree. My mum (now dead) was born in 1940 and was all about the rock and roll era like Elvis and the swinging 60s. Her and my dad even met the Beatles by chance once. The last thing she wanted to hear was the effing white cliffs of Dover! She couldn’t even remember the war!!

My MIL was born in India in the 40’s and came to the UK to go to University in the 60’s and was part of the hippy movement in the 70’s still loves George Harrison, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. She has said she feels so old in a care home.

I’m unsure, my mum was born 1936 so was a child in the war and an adult in the 1960s.

However she’s now at the stage whereby she’s forgotten most of her adulthood and just keeps talking of ‘home’, her parents and her siblings do maybe for her war time stuff isn’t that inappropriate

Sign me up!

I think a mobile disco would work better, not everyone in a care home could get to a club but you could take it too them.

They're, in about 99% of cases, on minimum wage with no extra allowance for overtime, backshift, or nightshift, and they're worked to exhaustion. They're not experts in music, nor do they have any particular access to age appropriate music. That's on the management and owners.

The 1912 Titanic or the 1997 Titanic?

If I'm in a care home in my 90s, the age appropriate stuff will be The Osmonds, Slade and Sweet. Maybe not great singalong music but if they add in ABBA we can all join in.
I imagine that I won't be able to recognise my husband but will still know all the words of the long version of Don McLeans American Pie

I’m not sure it is. The lady gig I was at in a Care Home the singer was in an ABBA style jumpsuit and sang a range of of songs from the 70s.

Well I’ll be in a care home rocking out to Led Zeppelin or the Sex Pistols 🤘

I know about it through unfortunate personal experience with my mum.
She ended up in a dementia wing of a care home in her final year. Her parents were the genuine war generation, my mum had been a 20 something in the 60s. The care home did loads of the Vera Lyn stuff, she hated it but I accept that she was one of the younger ones in there and they may have been catering for some in their 80s and 90s.
I found the opposite to what you said in your post. Playing music from her actual era and more modern times lifted her mood. Even in her last months, a repetitive pass the balloon type task would have depressed the hell out of her. Her memory was shit, she lost her mobility and ability to do stuff but she hadn’t lost her intelligence and hated to be talked to and treated like a child (which happens a lot in care homes and hospitals to old people).

I hope I’ll be in that one too!!! Seriously hope they’ll update things soon I’m getting towards retirement age and will literally go dotty if they’re playing wartime tunes if I have to succumb.

I will want the smiths, nirvana, rage against the machine, charlatans, stone roses and some drum and bass and classic house.

I will be grooving away on that Zimmer frame!

Couldn’t agree more. If I ever go into a care home I hope there will be loads of disco music.