Is it common for dementia patients to chew on pencils? And how do I stop it?

my mom was an insulin dependant diabetic . you can bet your ass if she wanted cherry chocolate ice cream in her last few months of life -- she got cherry chocolate ice cream ..

chewing on colored pencils isnt likely to be the diagnoses on her death certificate so i wouldnt really worry about it . you are dealing with a terminally ill person . you aint going to save them , just try to give them comfort .

Well, actually, sometimes colored pencils shouldn't be as sharp as pencils used for writing. With less sharp ones, different textures can be created. Perhaps you can experiment and show her how using the whole side of the colored portion of the pencil creates different effects.

Better to chew than to stab her husband with it( like my mother in law did)

With dementia patients, often they claim that things don't work right. My cousin couldn't get the remote to work right and she would throw it down in frustration saying it was broken. She did the same thing with her phone. Writing would frustrate her.

Due to the brain preventing them from focusing, processing and using proper hand eye coordination, they are not able to do certain skills, so sharpening pencils is probably not a task she can do any longer. ALSO, if you watch carefully, the pencils may very well be plenty sharp, when she says they aren't. She may just be thinking that they need sharpening. That kind of behavior is not uncommon either.

I think you will just have to breeze by every 10 minutes or so and sharpen her pencils, I can't see any other way to stop the behaviour. Maybe you can make sure she has several of her favourite colours handy too.

That's possible I suppose. She is pretty vocal about things when they hurt though so I don't think that's the reason. I think she just has a hard time using the pencil sharpeners. But I don't know what else to do because she has an electric and a manual one on the table. She gets so frustrated at the electric one because if something gets stuck in there she can't take it apart so she bangs it on the table. So far she's broken two. The manual ones are hard to use because of her arthritis.

I don't think there is a way to make her stop doing it, unless someone constantly supervises her. I might replace the pencils with NON TOXIC color crayons. They likely will taste terrible and she won't want to eat more than one.

I was wondering if your Grandmother was biting on the pencils not to sharpen them, but because her teeth actually hurt? Sorta like a baby does when teething.