A committee in my city recently posted a survey with an all-too-common question about respondents’ ages. The available choices:
As if someone who is 66 years old has similar issues to someone who’s 96!
Why is the difference between a 56- and 66-year-old important, but differences between a 66-year-old and a 96-year old aren’t?
The survey was about family issues. I know people in their late 60s and early 70s who are caregivers to elderly parents, or who are key daycare providers for young grandchildren – or both. Those are family issues, and ones that may no longer affect them in another 20 or 30 years.
We’ve been conditioned to think that once you’re old, that’s all that defines you, all that matters.
But that’s wrong.
“Aging is an especially heterogeneous process: in fact, we become more different from one another the older we become. This is due to both societal and individual factors,” writes Yale Professor Becca Levy in Breaking the Age Code.
“Thinking of everyone over the age of sixty as the same makes about as much sense as lumping everyone between the ages of twenty and fifty in the same category. Unfortunately, many news stories and health studies in the US and globally either exclude older people or place them in a homogenous demographic. This makes it impossible to take a closer look or to create policies and programs that could better direct resources to this age group. It also makes it easy for us to avoid considering the remarkable diversity of the aging process.”
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