Reference no: EM133656607
Assignment:
- When do you think a person enters the older adult age group?
- What are some beliefs you hold about older people?
- What are some stereotypes about age that could influence how older adults may feel about their own aging process?
- Where do these stereotypes come from? Think of examples from movies, social media, advertising, songs, etc.
The magic age of 65
There is no set rule about when an individual is considered to be an older adult. Nonetheless, the age of 65 has come to signify the official age of entry into older adulthood. The association of age 65 with the start of older adulthood can be traced to the Social Security system that the U.S. government established in 1935. At the time the Social Security Act was signed into law, the country was in the middle of the Great Depression, with many people in need (Brinkley, 2015). Among other functions, Social Security (discussed in more detail) was intended to provide some level of economic security in the form of a monthly pension to older adults when they retired from the paid workforce.
Individuals in the United States who made contributions throughout their working years became eligible for Social Security pension benefits once they reached 65, an age selected based on that used by many state retirement systems already in place as well as the federal Railroad Retirement System. However, as one step to insure the Social Security system remains financially solvent, the government is gradually raising the age at which workers become eligible to draw full pension benefits from 65 to 67. Time will tell whether the chronological age of 65, which has become an arbitrary marker of entry into older adulthood, will be pushed up as the age of eligibility for Social Security benefits increases.
Categories of older aduithood
A great deal of information in this book is about older adults as a group, and many references are made to averages. General statements about older adults are one way of organizing what we know. At the same time, keep in mind that averages do not describe every individual in the group.
It would be a mistake to assume that once a person reaches age 65, he or she becomes a member of a homogeneous group. People in any age group are diverse-they have what psychologists call individual differences, or interindividual variability. Among people aged 65 and older (65+), there is interindividual variability on almost every possible measure. Some 65-year-olds are fully retired from the paid labor force, while others work full-time. Some 75-vear-olds suffer from incapacitating health problems, while others lead active lives, traveling or participating in walking groups or marathon races. Some Bo-year-olds have difficulty with hearing or with memory, while others can hear a pin drop and never forget a name. Study after study has shown that individual differences are even greater in the older age group than they are in young adult or middle-aged groups.