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Table of contents

This aging of the baby boom cohort has serious implications for society. Health care is one of the areas most impacted by this trend. For years, hand-wringing has abounded about the additional burden the boomer cohort will place on the publicly funded health care system. The main sources of cost increase to the health care system come from inflation, rising overall population, and advances in medical technologies new pharmaceutical drugs, surgical techniques, diagnostic and imaging techniques, and end-of-life care.

With respect to end-of-life care, the average Canadian now receives approximately one and a half times more health care services than the average Canadian did in Lee, Even with modest economic growth, existing levels of health care service can be maintained without difficulty if the total increase in costs of health care from all sources, including aging, result in an annual increase in health care budget expenditures of 4.

Other studies indicate that aging boomers will bring economic growth to the health care industries, particularly in areas like pharmaceutical manufacturing and home health care services Bierman, Unlike the elderly of previous generations, boomers do not expect that turning 65 means their active lives are over. They are not willing to abandon work or leisure activities, but they may need more medical support to keep living vigorous lives. This desire of a large group of overyear-olds wanting to continue with a high activity level is driving innovation in the medical industry Shaw, It is not until the final year of life that health care expenditures undergo a dramatic increase.

The implication is that with people living increasingly longer and healthier lives, the issue of the cost of health care and aging needs to be refocused on end-of-life care options. The economic impact of aging boomers is also an area of concern for many observers. Although the baby boom generation earned more than previous generations and enjoyed a higher standard of living, they also spent their money lavishly and did not adequately prepare for retirement.

This will have a ripple effect on the economy as boomers work and spend less. The Canada and Quebec Pension Plans are government-run retirement programs funded primarily through payroll taxes. Poverty rates for elderly couples were reduced from Observers acknowledge that the systems are run very well, but their payments do not cover cost-of-living expenses, and in the absence of adequate retirement savings, the economic situation of retirees is threatened.

With the aging boomer cohort starting to receive pension benefits, and with fewer workers paying into the pension trust fund, it is estimated that by the fund will have to start drawing on its investment income in order to make payments Davidson, This percentage is expected to increase and will have a huge impact on the dependency ratio : the number of productive working citizens to non-productive young, disabled, elderly Bartram and Roe, The number of people above age 60 in China today is about million, which amounts to As health care improves and life expectancy increases across the world, elder care will be an emerging issue.

Wienclaw suggests that with fewer working-age citizens available to provide home care and long-term assisted care to the elderly, the costs of elder care will increase. Worldwide, the expectation governing the amount and type of elder care varies from culture to culture. For example, in Asia the responsibility for elder care lies firmly on the family Yap, Thang, and Traphagan, This is different from the approach in most Western countries, where the elderly are considered independent and are expected to tend to their own care. It is not uncommon for family members to intervene only if the elderly relative requires assistance, often due to poor health.

Even then, caring for the elderly is considered voluntary. In North America, decisions to care for an elderly relative are often conditionally based on the promise of future returns, such as inheritance or, in some cases, the amount of support the elderly provided to the caregiver in the past Hashimoto, These differences are based on cultural attitudes toward aging.

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Cultural attitudes in Japan prior to approximately supported the idea that the elderly deserve assistance Ogawa and Retherford, However, seismic shifts in major social institutions like family and economy have created an increased demand for community and government care. For example, the increase in women working outside the home has made it more difficult to provide in-home care to aging parents, leading to an increase in the need for government-supported institutions Raikhola and Kuroki, In North America, by contrast, many people view caring for the elderly as a burden.

Chinese Canadians, for example, are thought to have a higher sense of filial responsibility and to perceive providing family assistance for the elderly as a more normal aspect of life than Caucasian Canadians Funk, Chappell, and Liu, It is important to note that even within a country, not all demographic groups treat aging the same way.

While most Americans are reluctant to place their elderly members into out-of-home assisted care, demographically speaking, the groups least likely to do so are Latinos, African Americans, and Asians Bookman and Kimbrel, Globally, Canada and other wealthy nations are fairly well equipped to handle the demands of an exponentially increasing elderly population. However, peripheral and semi-peripheral nations face similar increases without comparable resources. Poverty among elders is a concern, especially among elderly women. The feminization of the aging poor, evident in peripheral nations, is directly due to the number of elderly women in those countries who are single, illiterate, and not a part of the labour force Mujahid, In , the Second World Assembly on Aging was held in Madrid, Spain, resulting in the Madrid Plan, an internationally coordinated effort to create comprehensive social policies to address the needs of the worldwide aging population.

The plan identifies three themes to guide international policy on aging: 1 publicly acknowledging the global challenges caused by, and the global opportunities created by, a rising global population; 2 empowering the elderly; and 3 linking international policies on aging to international policies on development Zelenev, The Madrid Plan has not yet been successful in achieving all its aims. However, it has increased awareness of the various issues associated with a global aging population, as well as raising the international consciousness to the way that the factors influencing the vulnerability of the elderly social exclusion, prejudice and discrimination, and a lack of socio-legal protection overlap with other developmental issues basic human rights, empowerment, and participation , leading to an increase in legal protections Zelenev, As human beings grow older, they go through different phases or stages of life.

It is helpful to understand aging in the context of these phases as aging is not simply a physiological process.


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A life course is the period from birth to death, including a sequence of predictable life events such as physical maturation and the succession of age-related roles: child, adolescent, adult, parent, senior, etc. At each point in life, as an individual sheds previous roles and assumes new ones, new institutions or situations are involved, which require both learning and a revised self-definition.

You are no longer a toddler, you are in kindergarten now! You are no longer a child, you are in high school now! You are no longer a student, you have a job now! You are no longer single, you are going to have a child now! You are no longer in mid-life, it is time to retire now!

What makes a city a good place to grow old?

Each phase comes with different responsibilities and expectations, which of course vary by individual and culture. The fact that age-related roles and identities vary according to social determinations mean that the process of aging is much more significantly a social phenomenon than a biological phenomenon. Children love to play and learn, looking forward to becoming preteens. As preteens begin to test their independence, they are eager to become teenagers. Teenagers anticipate the promises and challenges of adulthood. Adults become focused on creating families, building careers, and experiencing the world as an independent person.

Finally, many adults look forward to old age as a wonderful time to enjoy life without as much pressure from work and family life. In old age, grandparenthood can provide many of the joys of parenthood without all the hard work that parenthood entails. As work responsibilities abate, old age may be a time to explore hobbies and activities that there was no time for earlier in life. But for other people, old age is not a phase looked forward to.

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These differing views on the life course are the result of the cultural values and norms into which people are socialized. Through the phases of the life course, dependence and independence levels change. At birth, newborns are dependent on caregivers for everything. As babies become toddlers and toddlers become adolescents and then teenagers, they assert their independence more and more.

What makes a city a good place to grow old?

Gradually, children are considered adults, responsible for their own lives, although the point at which this occurs is widely variable among individuals, families, and cultures. As Riley notes, the process of aging is a lifelong process and entails maturation and change on physical, psychological, and social levels. Age, much like race, class, and gender, is a hierarchy in which some categories are more highly valued than others. For example, while many children look forward to gaining independence, Packer and Chasteen suggest that even in children, age prejudice leads both society and the young to view aging in a negative light.

This, in turn, can lead to a widespread segregation between the old and the young at the institutional, societal, and cultural levels Hagestad and Uhlenberg, In the early s, a New York physician named Dr. Ignatz Nascher coined the term geriatrics , a medical specialty focusing on the elderly. He created the word by combining two Greek words: geron old man and iatrikos medical treatment. Nascher refused to accept this dismissive view, seeing it as medical neglect. Nascher saw the practice of caring for the elderly as separate from the practice of caring for the young, just as pediatrics caring for children is different from caring for grown adults Clarfield, Nascher had high hopes for his pioneering work.

He wanted to treat the aging, especially those who were poor and had no one to care for them. Conditions were often terrible in these almshouses, where the aging were often sent and just forgotten. Each person experiences age-related changes based on many factors. Biological factors such as molecular and cellular changes are called primary aging , while aging that occurs due to controllable factors such as lack of physical exercise and poor diet is called secondary aging Whitbourne and Whitbourne, Most people begin to see signs of aging after age 50 when they notice the physical markers of age.

Skin becomes thinner, drier, and less elastic. Wrinkles form. Hair begins to thin and grey. Men prone to balding start losing hair. The difficulty or relative ease with which people adapt to these changes is dependent in part on the meaning given to aging by their particular culture. A culture that values youthfulness and beauty above all else leads to a negative perception of growing old. Conversely, a culture that reveres the elderly for their life experience and wisdom contributes to a more positive perception of what it means to grow old. The effects of aging can feel daunting, and sometimes the fear of physical changes like declining energy, food sensitivity, and loss of hearing and vision is more challenging to deal with than the changes themselves.

The way people perceive physical aging is largely dependent on how they were socialized. If people can accept the changes in their bodies as a natural process of aging, the changes will not seem as frightening. Additionally, , people, or 1. Parker and Thorslund found that while the trend is toward steady improvement in most disability measures, there is a concomitant increase in functional impairments disability and chronic diseases.

At the same time, medical advances have reduced some of the disabling effects of those diseases Crimmins, Some impacts of aging are gender specific. Some of the disadvantages that aging women face rise from long-standing social gender roles. For example, the Canada Pension Plan CPP favours men over women, inasmuch as women do not earn CPP benefits for the unpaid labour they perform as an extension of their gender roles.

In the health care field, elderly female patients are more likely than elderly men to see their health care concerns trivialized Sharp, and are more like to have the health issues labelled psychosomatic Munch, Another female-specific aspect of aging is that mass-media outlets often depict elderly females in terms of negative stereotypes and as less successful than older men Bazzini and Mclntosh, On the other hand, aging men have fewer opportunities to assert the masculine identities in the company of other men e. Some social scientists have observed that the aging male body is depicted in the Western world as genderless Spector-Mersel, Male or female, growing older means confronting the psychological issues that come with entering the last phase of life.

Young people moving into adulthood take on new roles and responsibilities as their lives expand, but an opposite arc can be observed in old age. What are the hallmarks of social and psychological change? Retirement — the idea that one may stop working at a certain age — is a relatively recent idea.

A Point of View: The paradox of growing old

Up until the late 19th century, people worked about 60 hours a week and did so until they were physically incapable of continuing. In , Germany was the first country to introduce a social insurance program that provided relief from poverty for seniors. Social Security Administration, N. The retirement age was initially set at age These plans continued to provide benefits to seniors at age 70, but by age 65 had been gradually phased in Canadian Museum of History, N.

In the 21st century, most people hope that at some point they will be able to stop working and enjoy the fruits of their labour. But do people look forward to this time or do they fear it? When people retire from familiar work routines, some easily seek new hobbies, interests, and forms of recreation.

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Many find new groups and explore new activities, but others may find it more difficult to adapt to new routines and loss of social roles, losing their sense of self-worth in the process. Each phase of life has challenges that come with the potential for fear. Erik H. Erikson — , in his view of socialization, broke the typical life span into eight phases.


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Each phase presents a particular challenge that must be overcome.