GROWING OLD

...And how can people retire to something better than rocking chair inertia and deterioration...

...When children repeatedly see old people scorned, they are thereby encouraged to form a low opinion of authority and discipline and t;o put too much trust in their own capacities and judgment...

...How are we going to help older people who have nothing to do find something to do that means anything...

...Responsibility between generations in our society is more and more conceived not as a reciprocal obligation but as a one-way street, from parents to children only...

...By example and guidance, they gave the grandchildren invaluable training in maturity, in getting along with people, in abiding by time-tested social usages...

...Many of them are unable to work because of disability...

...The medical care needs of the aged represent a particularly serious economic threat...

...Now, with the average person on somebody else's payroll and generally deprived of the right to decide when he should retire, about seventy per cent are in that category...

...Not long ago there usually was little difference between the total span of life and the work span...

...It calls for education for maturity...

...Having forced death to wait, we can do no less than to make the additional years of life more meaningful...

...It is hardly surprising under the circumstances that Americans are so frequently sensitive about their age and try to conceal by various subterfuges the telltale signs of growing old...

...They need much wider opportunities than now exist for congenial and meaningful social and recreational activities that can bolster inner bulwarks of security, provide fellowship and new experiences, and arouse latent interests and talents...

...In the fifty-five to sixty-four group, thirteen out of every 100 men are idle...

...Smaller homes and the profusion of labor-saving devices have sharply cut down the tasks in which old people were once helpful, leaving baby-sitting as perhaps the outstanding function of grandparents...

...They themselves made the decision on when it was time to retire...

...We barely have begun to give serious thought to the implications of two relatively new and enormously significant phenomena in American life—the growing plentitude of leisure acquired for us by technological advances and the fact that most men now outlive the period when they can engage in paid work and most women outlive the period when they are engaged in bearing and raising their children...

...Their dignity and stature have waned, and they have lost much of their role in bringing up grandchildren...

...They often retired piecemeal, gradually turning over heavier duties to their sons or employes...

...Not only has the cruel fiction been adopted that people automatically become unfit upon reaching their sixty-fifth birthday, but discriminatory practices also are widely prevalent against middle-aged job seekers, frequently starting in the forties for men and even earlier for women...

...The profound revolution in the character of the American family, with the gradual transition from the common three-generation establishment to the smaller household limited to parents and their young children, has had momentous effects all around...

...At stake are the stability of the economy and individual and social stability...

...There is little question that many older people are able to continue functioning quite efficiently and are eager to keep on working, that the satisfaction of earning his own living and of feeling useful is extremely important to the average aging person, and that utilization of many thousands of able and willing elderly individuals who now are rejected would add materially to the productiveness of our economy...

...In prolonging average life expectancy, within a century, from forty to seventy years and at the same time extending the period of vigor, sdence has added a whole new period to the life cycle and shifted the boundaries and goals of youth, middle age, and old age...

...They need access to more readily available and less costly medical care facilities, with adequate preventive and rehabilitation services...

...When an older person finds himself unloved and unwanted, regression into second childhood may become a welcome escape from an unbearable reality...

...Older people frequently feel old because society tags them that way and they tend to accept its discriminatory judgment...

...It calls for forethought, flexibility, and a wider development of interests beyond the narrow occupational sphere...

...With smaller families, there are fewer children to share the responsibility...

...At the age of sixty-five, men now have an average life expectancy of thirteen more years and women of sixteen years...

...Aside from the harm done to the aged when their self-respect is undermined, there are many hazards to children in this situation...

...He has twice been honored by the Lasker Foundation for his distinguished writing on medicine.—The Editors Tn no phase of the problem of aging are the issues more tangible—and the conflict between the gains in health and longevity and our practices more obvious—than in the economic sphere...

...It calls for a radical departure from our present educational approach, in which learning stops for most people in their teens...

...Not only can such an attitude contribute to youthful misbehavior, but many of the young of today will inevitably carry over into their own old age the image of aging they absorb in their early years, making the later period of their life that much more painful...

...Some of us can still look back with a memory vibrant with emotion to the time when grandparents were precious fixtures in the family circle...

...Since then, average life expectancy has been extended by nearly thirty years, or seventy-five per cent...

...Children not only worked the farm but were an insurance against having to depend on public or private charity in old age...

...The preponderance of expert opinion is that a great many more of the aged than are now employed could go on working if given the chance to do so and if we had more adequate health services...

...Personal relationships are often strained to the breaking point when elderly parents have to live with grown-up children in cramped city dwellings...

...They need housing geared to their special requirements and limited income range...

...It is primarily within the family that the concept of what it is like to grow old is shaped in the young...

...But occupational life expectancy, as measured in terms of opportunity for older people to go on earning their own living, has been reduced to such an extent that by 1945 the ratio of employed men in the sixty-five-plus group was down to one out of every two, and today it is only one out of every three...

...What has been happening is most graphically told by a few employment figures...

...A beginning scarcely has been made...

...Many of us therefore resort to the neurotic solution of refusing to accept the realities of the advancing years...

...While there have been increasing signs of public concern over the aging problem and numerous studies of the situation, the bulk of the output so far has been in words that are yet to be converted into concrete and effective action...

...These questions obviously go far beyond the realm of economics...

...Retirement on a mass scale calls for far-reaching changes in our values and a new design for living...

...The rejection of the aged drives the young to avoid the thought of aging and to deny in their own minds the need to plan for the time when they themselves will be old...

...The erosion in employment opportunities becomes particularly marked after the age of fifty-five...

...Most older people were self-employed on the farm, in small businesses and in crafts, and they continued working as long as they were physically able...

...Our educational system still is geared to a social order in which the average person's life was much shorter than it now is and leisure was a luxury limited largely to the wealthy...

...But it is totally inadequate to do so in a society where the average individual can look forward to about a quarter of a century of retirement from the duties of active parenthood and ten to fifteen years of retirement from work, and where there is a steadily mounting abundance of spare time...

...Before the advent of our predominantly wage economy, the sharp break between employment and retirement, now becoming so common, was a relatively rare occurrence...

...The burden has become much heavier than it once was...

...When it was usual to share a common household, children took care of their aged parents as a matter of course...

...The aged have been deprived of the invaluable niche provided by the more inclusive family of the past...

...The ways in which they will respond to their own aging—and in which they will later treat their own parents—will depend to a considerable extent upon the concept of old age they form by observing how their grandparents are treated...

...Here medical science and our customs may be seen most clearly working at cross-purposes, on the one hand progressively lengthening the average life span and on the other insidiously contracting the commonly assumed period of usefulness...

...Margaret Mead that "it is an utterly fallacious and arbitrary idea to put all the learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age...

...Urgently needed is a broad and imaginative expansion of adult education facilities for training in readjustment to the changing tasks and interests of later life and for greater competence in the art of the constructive use of leisure...

...Man cannot alter the length of the day, but he has accomplished what is, in effect, the same thing by multiplying the number of the days of his life...

...But today grandparents have increasingly become symbols of how little the young can learn from their elders...

...In 1870, eight of every ten men sixty-five years or more of age in the United States were gainfully employed...

...The grandparents felt useful in their function as im-parters of tradition...

...Can a way be found to finance retirement more adequately so as to provide the aged with a decent standard of living...

...It is true that there has been a gradual rise in the level of social security benefits...

...When women in the same age bracket are included, the employment ratio is one out of every four...

...This phenomenal accomplishment has set the stage for sweeping changes m our pursuits and values...

...They cannot be evaded with such soothing cliches as "golden age" and "sunset years...

...In the era when the economy still was largely rural, most old people had important sources of economic security in the form of a large family and ownership of a farm...

...It would give you much more time for work, for play, for the companionship of your family and friends, for doing the things you most enjoy doing, for striking out into new fields of experience and achievement...

...The bonds of affection woven in those days benefited the old as well as the young...

...Greenberg is the prize-winning writer on medical problems for the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin...

...Closely tied to the problem of employment for older people is our ambivalence toward both retirement and responsibility for support of elderly parents...

...Should this gift of added years be merely that much more time on the shelf...

...About 100 years ago, only five per cent of men sixty-five or older listed themselves as retired...

...The lack of job opportunities for older people and their loss of a meaningful role within the family constellation raise a host of crucial issues...

...This clearly would require a complete rearrangement not only of your daily routine but of the whole pace and fabric of your life...

...Yet retirement frequently looms as a severe threat entailing the loss of income, loss of prestige, loss of meaningful relationships with other people, and loss of many other aspects of purposeful living that in our culture are closely associated with work...

...In another ten years, there will be about twenty million of them...

...Every day about 3,000 more Americans become "aged" by crossing the arbitrary line of their sixty-fifth birthday...

...But while it is increasingly regarded as proper to depend upon tax-supported sources for care of the aged, countless people remain deeply perplexed by their inability either to free themselves completely of an obligation long firmly imbedded in our moral code or to carry it out...

...In circumstances where the overall life span and working life virtually coincided, it was reasonable to confine schooling primarily to a preparation for productive . adulthood...

...Since 1900, there has been a drop of more than ten per cent in the labor force ratio of men who are forty-five or older...

...But today they are much less able or willing to do so...

...In a culture where the qualities of youth are held up as the transcendent ideal and constant emphasis is laid on novelty and physical glamor, old age is inevitably looked down upon as a condition of inferiority...

...The aged cannot escape the humiliating realization that they are intruding upon the lives of their children and have become an economic liability...

...Many children still continue to support their old parents wholly or in part, often at considerable personal sacrifice...

...If many old people now feel useless, it is because not only life expectancy but also what is generally considered the useless period of life have been lengthened...

...We pursue the chimera of the unrecoverable past and desperately try to stay and look "young...

...The younger people, unable either to emancipate themselves from their sense of filial obligation or to live up to it under the changed conditions of our economy and the longer life span, often are torn between feelings of resentment for having to put up with their parents and of guilt for entertaining any such sentiments...

...But the sobering reality is that in many cases neither social security benefits nor savings come anywhere near assuring comfortable retirement and that countless older men and women are living on the edge of destitution...

...Not only do parents live longer and are likely to have shorter working careers, but it is difficult to fit them into a small city home, and they often have to be cared for in separate establishments...

...But many others have simply given up trying to combat age discrimination in employment...

...What is wrong with this approach is summed up pungently in the comment by Dr...

...No society can continue to be healthy with such a high proportion of rejected and underprivileged people...

...One of the great challenges facing us lies in the possibilities of arresting the insidious course of the sociological aging process...

...All too often, deterioration now is accelerated by the scars of rejection...

...It has opened up challenging possibilities that are still to be realized...

...The conflict between the traditional concept of responsibility toward the old and present-day realities is by no means confined to financial considerations...

...It is no wonder that retirement often is the subject of both eager anticipation and worried concern...

...There are many other things the aged need...

...The performance of the aged is affected vitally by the climate of their environment and what it does to their personal assessment of their own capabilities and limitations...

...Is there any way, of devising a more reasonable and flexible system of retirement than the present arbitrary approach which disregards state of health, skills, and experience...

...One way of looking at what has happened is to try to imagine what it would mean to you if the length of every day in your life were suddenly increased by three-quarters, from twenty-four to forty-two hours...

...Retirement is often viewed as a period of idyllic relaxation earned by years of hard work and as an opportunity for carefree enjoyment of the things one always has wanted to do...