Providing LO a place to hide things.

Mark L. Warner's to Alzheimer's Proofing Your Home guide, suggests providing drawers, closet, trunks, boxes that are more accessible and attractive than the safe {restricted} storage areas to encourage LO hiding things in known areas.

He also advocates removing waste baskets where things can be hidden or thrown out.

Does this approach work?

How early in the AD progression should these changes be implemented?

Well, my LO seems to be at stage 4 or 4.5 -- and I don't think it's necessary now. My guess is that stage 5 might be time to make some more environmental changes, but I'm not sure.

We haven't had to deal with this much since my father doesn't tend to hide things. But by analogy - it helped when we gave him a dummy phone to keep him from playing with (and disconnecting) the real one. We had an old handset lying around and gave him that to keep with him. It results in some confusion when the phone rings (which one should he use?) but on the whole it prevents more disruption than it causes. So the idea of accessible hiding places makes sense to me.

Best,
Alan