Your dad is standing by the front door with his coat on, and he wants to know where his mother is — she'll be worried, he says, if he's late home for tea. His mother died forty years ago. In the space of a heartbeat you have to decide what to say, and the true answer, "Dad, Granny's been gone since 1985," is the one thing you must not say. Because it would land as fresh grief, every single time.
This is one of the hardest parts of dementia for families, and it turns on a quiet skill that runs against every instinct: learning when not to correct.
The correction reflex — and why it backfires
We're wired to put things right. When someone we love says something untrue, the words are halfway out before we've thought — no, it's Tuesday; no, we sold that house years ago; no, Mum's not coming. With a healthy memory, correction is helpful. With dementia, it usually isn't, for a simple reason: the confusion isn't a mistake to be pointed out. It's the person's present reality, and arguing with it doesn't dissolve it — it just adds distress and, often, the humiliation of being contradicted about their own life.
You can win the fact and lose the person. They rarely remember the correction; they remember the feeling of being unsettled, wrong-footed, small.
Meet the feeling, not the fact
The kinder path is to answer the emotion underneath the words, which is nearly always real even when the details aren't. Your dad by the door isn't really asking about his mother; he's feeling a pull of duty and a flicker of worry. So you meet that.
- Reassure first. "She knows you're safe, Dad. Come and have a cup of tea with me first."
- Step into their world rather than dragging them into yours. Ask a gentle question about the mother he's picturing; let him talk. Connection settles people; contradiction agitates them.
- Redirect softly. A change of room, a warm drink, a favourite tune, a look at old photographs — a gentle turn of the moment does far more than a corrected fact.
This isn't lying to someone, and it isn't treating them like a child. It's choosing their peace over your need to be accurate.
Ease the confusion with cues, not tests
Between the difficult moments, you can quietly lower the overall level of confusion — not by quizzing or drilling, but by leaving the answers gently in view so your parent can find them without having to ask or be told:
- Keep the day visible. A large, plain day-and-date where they naturally look, so "which day is it?" answers itself. (More on that in "what day is it?".)
- Protect the rhythm. Meals, curtains, the radio at steady times — predictability is reassurance you don't have to speak.
- Reduce the noise. A calmer, less cluttered environment, one thing happening at a time, gives an overloaded mind less to lose its footing on.
- Never make it a test. "Do you remember?" and "I've just told you" both sting. Offer the answer freely, as if for the first time — because for them it is.
A calm screen that answers, without correcting
Some families find a quiet, at-a-glance screen helps here, because it lets the answer be there rather than something anyone has to supply. My Day is one uncluttered screen — a greeting by name, the time, the day and date in large words, a reassuring "you're at home", and the day's plan laid out in order, set up by a family member in a private area.
It's genuinely free, with nothing to install, and we're careful about what we claim for it: it's a calm way to see the day, not a medical device, and it makes no promise to fix confusion or improve memory. It simply offers the answer gently, as many times as it's needed — which is often kinder than a person having to ask, or a family member having to correct.
A word for the carer
Getting this right, over and over, on a tiring day, is genuinely hard — and no one does it perfectly. If you snap or slip into correcting, forgive yourself; it means you're human, not that you're failing. And don't do it alone:
- Alzheimer's Society (alzheimers.org.uk) — information and a support line.
- Dementia UK (dementiauk.org) — Admiral Nurses, specialist support for families.
The heart of it is small and steady: when the facts and the feelings pull apart, choose the feelings. You'll rarely regret the moment you kept someone calm instead of correct — and it's the same instinct that lies behind simply wanting to know a parent is okay, gently and without fuss.