Why your Mum keeps asking the same question, and the kindest way to answer

You answer the question. Ten minutes later, she asks again. You answer it again. Five minutes later, she asks it a third time. You feel something tighten in your chest, and you try not to let it show.

This is one of the most exhausting bits of caring for a parent whose memory is changing. It looks like inattention. It feels like she is not listening. It sometimes feels deliberate, especially when the question keeps landing right when you need to be doing something else. Almost none of that is true, but the body's reaction comes anyway.

What is happening in her brain

Short-term memory is the bit of cognitive function that goes earliest in most forms of dementia, and in milder cognitive decline too. When she asks "what time is John coming round" and you tell her, the answer goes into short-term storage. In a healthy brain, that storage holds the answer until either you act on it or you consciously discard it. In a brain with reduced short-term memory, that storage may hold the answer for a minute, or it may not store it at all.

So when she asks the same question ten minutes later, she is not testing you. She is not being lazy. As far as her brain is concerned, this is genuinely the first time she has thought about it. The previous conversation is gone.

This is also why repeating yourself in a slightly louder, slightly more frustrated voice does not help. The problem is not that she did not hear you the first time. It is that the storage has not held.

The question is rarely about the answer

The other thing worth knowing is that the repeated question almost never reflects a real need for the literal information. If she keeps asking "what time is John coming round", she is not anxious to plan her day. She is anxious about something more general, often something like "am I going to be left on my own" or "have I missed something I was supposed to do".

"What time is John coming" is the brain's way of reaching for that anxiety using a concrete question. If you answer just the question, the anxiety has not been touched, and a few minutes later it surfaces again as the same question.

Once you spot this, the responses you can offer get wider. Answering the question is one option, sure. Answering the feeling underneath it is often more effective.

What works better than just answering

Different things work in different houses. The patterns we hear most often:

• Write it down once. A small whiteboard in the kitchen with "John is coming at 2pm" can intercept many of the repeats without you having to be the answer machine. She looks at it, the brain re-stores it for a few minutes, the question recedes. Useful even when she is not consciously consulting the board, the visual presence in the room helps.
• Answer the first time, then gently shift the activity. First ask, give the answer cleanly. Second ask within twenty minutes, give the answer briefly and add something practical: "John is at two, shall we have a cup of tea while we wait." Third ask, skip the answer entirely and just go to the activity: "let's put the kettle on for ten minutes".
• Answer the feeling. "It sounds like you want company. I am here, and John will be too in a bit." This often resolves the question for longer than a literal answer does, because it addresses what is actually being asked.
• Reduce the trigger if you can spot one. If the repeated question is about a future event, sometimes mentioning the event less helps. Don't keep telling her in advance about things; let them arrive.

Things that quietly make it worse

• "You just asked me that." She did not, from her point of view. Pointing it out makes her feel told off without knowing why.
• Sighing audibly. She picks up the sigh before she registers what the sigh is about.
• Saying "remember, I told you ten minutes ago". She does not remember. The phrase is a small dig that lands without context.
• Refusing to answer at all. Withdrawing tends to spike the anxiety underneath the question and bring back more asking, not less.

What it costs you, and what to do about it

The hardest bit about repeated questions is not the questions. It is what hearing the same question for the eighth time does to your own nervous system. Adult children caring for a parent with cognitive decline almost universally describe a particular flavour of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how physically tiring the visit was, and everything to do with the brain effort of staying patient through repetition.

A few things help:

• Plan in a small break. Even ten minutes in the garden while a sibling or carer takes a turn resets your patience meter. Treat it like a smoke break: not optional.
• Lower your expectations of how much else you can do in a visit. If you go round expecting to also do the bills and the laundry, the repeated questions feel like an interruption. If your only job for the visit is being present, the repetition stops feeling like an interruption to anything.
• Talk to other family members openly about how draining this part is. The phrase that has helped us most: "the patience comes from somewhere, and it has to be topped up by someone else now and again".

When to mention it to a GP

The threshold is not a number of questions. It is whether the pattern is new, or whether it has changed in severity recently. A parent who has always been a little forgetful, who is now asking the same thing seven times in an afternoon, is showing a change. That change is worth mentioning at the next GP visit. Not because anything dramatic will happen, but because a baseline gets established and small medication reviews (especially for anxiety and sleep) can sometimes help meaningfully.

The GP cannot stop the underlying repetition. They can sometimes help the surrounding agitation.

Where Getwello fits

The daily check-in is what it sounds like: one button, one tap. For a parent who repeats questions, that simplicity matters. There is nothing to remember about how the app works, no menu to navigate. It is a single yes-button each morning, and the family is reassured without anyone having to ring and hear the same question for the eighth time today.

If you are at the "I think something is changing" stage, our post on is Mum just being forgetful or is it the start of something more covers the patterns to watch. Our piece on when Mum says she wants to go home covers a sister pattern that often turns up around the same time.