372: Why Trying to Trick Someone Living with Dementia Almost Always Backfires

Full analysis

Dementia care expert Teepa Snow and host Greg Phelps challenge the popular idea of "tricking" someone with dementia into eating, bathing, or going to bed. Their argument: people living with dementia often sense when they're being manipulated, which erodes trust. Connection-based strategies — acknowledging what the person is reacting to, staying curious, and adapting your own approach — work better than deception.

What was covered

• The "tricks" framing problem. Greg Phelps raised an article he'd read offering tricks to redirect people with dementia. Teepa Snow objected to both the word and the underlying assumption — that the person can't tell what's happening.
• Why tricking usually fails. Snow's core point: a person with dementia is not stupid. If the caregiver isn't skilled enough to pull it off convincingly, the person senses something is wrong, which damages the relationship. "The disease does that often enough," Snow said — the brain is already deceiving the person; a caregiver shouldn't add to it.
• The stroganoff scenario. Phelps and Snow walked through a concrete example: a person refuses to eat a meal they'd requested earlier, saying it "looks like dog puke." Snow demonstrated two failure responses — insisting the person asked for it, and insisting they've always liked it — and then modeled what works: acknowledge the person's reaction without argument, briefly remove the food from view, and re-introduce it with a different sensory lead ("it smells great") rather than a logical argument.
• "Engagement strategy" vs. trick. Snow distinguished between a trick (hoping the person never figures out what happened) and an engagement strategy (openly working with the person's current reality). The strategy starts with curiosity: what is the person actually reacting to? What is blocking them right now?
• Flexibility as the core skill. Snow's repeated emphasis: the caregiver's job is to change their own behavior when the person's brain has changed, not to find a clever workaround. "I'm using my brain skill to support his changing brain."
• No single recipe. Snow explicitly said there is no cookbook approach. Strategies and tools exist, but every person and situation is unique, and caregivers need a full "tool belt" to adapt in the moment.

Notable claims & predictions

• Teepa Snow: "The person living with dementia is not actually stupid… are you really as good as you think you are?" — meaning caregivers who rely on tricks are overestimating their ability to deceive and underestimating the person's awareness.
• Teepa Snow: When a strategy stops working, that signals brain change, not stubbornness. The caregiver must be willing to let go of an approach that worked before and find a new one.
• Teepa Snow: Acknowledging the person's stated reality first — without correcting or arguing — is a prerequisite for any successful redirect. Skipping that step and going straight to "but you asked for this" reliably fails.
• Teepa Snow: Re-introducing a refused food after a short break, with a different sensory cue (smell rather than appearance), can work where direct persuasion didn't — not because you've fooled anyone, but because you've changed the context.
• Greg Phelps: Many caregiving articles leave readers "feeling less understood than when you first started" — they name a problem, suggest a trick, and offer no actual alternative strategy.

Fact check

The episode contains no quantitative claims, cited studies, benefit figures, or statistics. The guidance offered is experiential and observational, drawn from Teepa Snow's dementia-care practice. There is nothing here to fact-check against verifiable external data.

Snow's general claim — that people with dementia often retain emotional and relational awareness even when memory and reasoning are impaired — is consistent with well-established findings in dementia research (the phrase sometimes used is "emotional memory outlasts episodic memory"), though the episode does not cite any specific research to support it. Caregivers should know this is a widely held clinical view, not Snow's personal invention, but also that individual variation is significant depending on dementia type and stage.

No claims fail scrutiny.

Why this matters for you

• If you're caring for someone with dementia, the practical shift here is small but significant: before trying to redirect or persuade, acknowledge what the person is actually saying or reacting to. Skipping that step — going straight to "but you asked for it" — is the move that most reliably backfires, according to Snow.
• The "tool belt" framing is worth internalizing. Snow's point that no single strategy works for every person, or even for the same person over time, is a direct caution against articles (and well-meaning friends) who offer one-size fixes. What worked last month may not work this month as the disease progresses.
• Language matters inside caregiving households. If you use the word "trick" in your own self-talk about caregiving, Snow's argument is that the word reflects a mindset — one of outwitting a lesser opponent — that tends to produce brittle strategies. Replacing it with "engagement" or "approach" isn't just semantics; it changes what you look for.
• Thin on new information if you're already a practiced caregiver. The episode is short (under ten minutes) and covers ground that experienced dementia caregivers will recognize. Its value is mainly in articulating why connection-first strategies work, which can be useful when explaining your approach to other family members who default to arguing or correcting.