I hope there are perks to getting older. Youth is wasted on the young, as the saying goes. Mainly said by older people, I suspect.
In the 2021 Office for Seniors’ Attitudes Towards Ageing report, four in five New Zealanders reported “great respect” for the elderly. Half said that older people were an asset to society. “Only” 10% saw older people as a burden. I wonder how they’ll feel when they’re old.
New Zealand is a fairly typical Western culture, which means research orthodoxy would suggest we value youth more than we value age. There’s quite a lot of research that would support this claim – not to mention social media images of the young and the beautiful. And older folk railing against ageism. At least, it feels as if more folk are railing against ageism than against prejudice towards young people, but maybe I’m not the target demographic.
In this orthodoxy, Eastern cultures come out more positively on value attributed to age, driven by the filial piety often assumed to be baked into more collectivist cultures ‒ an emphasis on respect, obedience and care for one’s parents and elders (in life, but also in death). As with many things, that broad brush lacks nuance, as some but not all, Eastern cultures hold this value strongly. Filial piety may be stronger in Confucian cultures, such as in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
At the same time, the world has been a-changin’. Rapid industrialisation, longer lifespans and the financial challenge of looking after larger numbers of older people have presented challenges to this potentially centuries-old dynamic. Indeed, systematic analyses of all the studies conducted about attitudes towards older people suggest it’s collectivist cultures that have seen a more rapid rise in relative ageism as they’ve become more industrialised and unequal.
Perhaps the most interesting high-level finding in the Office for Seniors report is that the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to have had a positive impact on how one in four of us feels about older people (seven in 10 said it had made no difference). Younger people were most likely to report this improvement. Hmm, why?
The report found that many people reported greater awareness of, and worry for, older people. I cast my mind back to those first months, and I remember the concern about residential-care facilities in particular. Covid made many of us appreciate what we had, appreciate our futures, and appreciate the older people in our lives.
Maybe we had more space in our lives to think about our older family members. Maybe their inclusion in our bubble meant we spent more time with them. I know people who, with some flexibility over the permeability of their bubbles, took it upon themselves to keep an eye out for their elderly neighbours. Gin and tonic over the garden fence.
This is a good thing, because what research also says is that intergenerational contact is good for everyone, and maybe Covid created a context for this, even if it was Zoom-based family get-togethers. For older people, spending time with younger folk is associated with less loneliness, a sense of purpose and value, and better physical and mental wellbeing.
Younger people, particularly children, develop greater empathy and respect for others, and research also shows greater opportunity for the development of social skills and even critical thinking. Putting it all together means you also get a stronger sense of community, greater appreciation for diversity of others and others’ experiences and, phew, less ageism.
Just over a decade ago, a Dutch pilot programme gave university students the chance to live rent-free in an old folks’ home (with spare room capacity), in return for spending about seven hours a week of being good neighbours to the folks next door. Everyone got something out of it. I’m not sure our for-profit residential care industry has the space for it, unfortunately.
