3. Steps towards
a Society for all ages
- Late life: rewriting the scripts
- Midlife: a time of adjustment
- Adult years: a time for building up capital
- Youth: when lifestyles for longevity begin
- Childhood: the cradle of longevity
Individual life needs to be viewed and experienced as a unified whole, a continuum of interrelated and overlapping phases. Some early life experiences take effect in later years. Late life realities, and perceptions of these, influence earlier development and may generate self-fulfilling prophecies. The addition of years to life is transforming the second half of life, and has implications for earlier stages. These implications are examined briefly, starting with late life and working back down sequentially through the earlier stages.
Late life: rewriting the scripts.
Today, older persons are demographic and social pioneers. Grandparents now range in age from 35 to 105, and grandchildren from newborns to retirees, giving rise to a wide variety of grandparenting styles.
In addition to grandparenting roles, older persons have a wide range of socio-cultural roles or scripts, particularly in pre-industrial cultures. Industrialization has tended, through the institution of retirement, to marginalize older persons in some ways. In some places, the media has stereotyped older persons as patients or pensioners. Post-industrialization promises more flexibility for older persons to recover opportunities they customarily enjoy in pre-industrial settings as well as to explore new roles and meaning for late life. The net effect is a population of older persons worldwide sufficiently varied, flexible and complex to defy easy categories and clear cut roles.
Programmes to combat poverty, continuing education, literacy campaigns, new technologies, changing values and the addition of years to life are helping older persons explore and express a wide range of "doing, becoming and being" in the later years so that the place of elders in society, and their impact on socio-cultural development continues to evolve.
Late life encounters with frailty and finality can be understood as essential components of continuing development. The experience of loss can be transmuted into understanding and compassion. The approach of death is viewed by many as another transition. Thus, old age decline can be transmuted into high age development or wisdom.
Despite a prevalence in many places of narrow stereotypical images of older persons, the reality is that human diversity increases with age: eighty-year olds are more heterogeneous than eight-year olds, a natural consequences of varied lifetime choices. In varying ways throughout the world, the status, opportunities, entitlements and images of older women are more restrictive than those of older men -- discrepancies to be examined in 1999 and further explored in the context of ....Beijing+5 in the year 2000. At the same time, older women frequently enjoy close and enriching emotional attachments within families.
Gender convergences and divergences are frequently noted from midlife onwards. Stated briefly, the divergence is physical in that men tend to die earlier, women later though with more ailments. The convergences are more psychological: from midlife onwards, many men and women develop potentials which their earlier lifestyles had inhibited -- more relational competence and emotional expression for men in the case of some cultures, and more opportunities for developing political and intellectual competence for women in other cultures. These gender trends become less pronounced as societies across the world broaden opportunities throughout the lifecourse for men and women.
For debate: The developmental potential and diversity of late life need to be explored and supported, while also addressing the health care and income security needs of this stage of life. New terms, images and scripts are needed. Practical opportunities for participation in socio-economic life need to be preserved and expanded including, for example, training and access to credit.
Midlife: a time of adjustment
With the emergence of a new old age, midlife becomes an important transitional phase. Though it occurs at varying times and with varying schedules across the world, research has shown that it is a developmentally flexible time. It may be considered the prelude to active ageing, as adolescence is to active adulthood.
Just as the potential of youth can only be developed in the absence of poverty so too with midlife. Strategies to eradicate poverty include measures to develop a wide range of human potential, encompassing the four kinds of education laid out by a UNESCO Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, which include: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together and learning to be (Report entitled "Learning: the treasure within" 1996).
For debate: Midlife is a time of adjustment in family life, work and personal identity. Some experience it as a time for life review and preview, when they assess experiences to-date and plan for the future. Two distinct benefits could accrue from educational investments in midlife: release of individual potential and, relatedly, reduction of the potential for disease, decline and exclusions in old age together with their high human and financial costs.
Adult years: a time for building up capital
The adult years are a time for launching career and family and, when feasible, for engaging in continuing self-development and civic activities. Through such activities individuals build up their economic, social and human capital, and so can help ensure wellbeing in late life.
With industrialization, men and women's live are increasingly dominated by work or the search for it. Worldwide unemployment mires adult lives in material poverty, particularly in developing countries, and has led to many concentrated efforts to address it including through the Programme of Action of the World Summit for Social Development as well as the designation of 1997-2006 as the First United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty.
Conversely, employment can create "time poverty" when it occupies the centre of the day, week and year so that other important institutions -- family, community, and education -- become relegated to peripheral times in the evening and weekend.
Opportunities for education, work and leisure could be distributed vertically and flexibly throughout the entire lifecourse rather than in the more horizontal sequencing now prevalent in many places of education in youth, work in adult years and leisure after retirement in old age. This would allow individuals to accumulate human, social and economic capital in their most active years.
For debate: Flexible scheduling of adult years would need to be developed as an integrated system encompassing work, education, family and social life. Pre and post industrial societies, which tend to be more flexible in time scheduling than industrial ones, may find it possible to explore convergences in their efforts at creating a society for all ages.
Youth: when lifestyles for longevity begin
Youth today are likely to live longer than their parents, adding longevity to the many challenges already outlined in the United Nations Programme of Action for Youth to the Year 2000 and Beyond. Youth cannot know the distant future but they can know the likely consequences of early lifestyles, habits of mind and missed or missing opportunities.
The late life consequence of missed or missing educational and work opportunities is likely to be poverty. The consequence of hunger, stress, addictions and other manifestations of material and psychological poverty is chronic disease in mid and late life, restricting ability to participate mentally and physically. And the consequence of age-prejudice -- a habit of mind cultivated by a predominantly youth-oriented media -- is the perpetuation of a mental "age ghetto" that is detrimental to society and, evidently, to the youth themselves as they grow old.
Applying an athletic metaphor, it can be said that longevity requires an ability to envision the years ahead as a great marathon requiring certain mental, physical and practical preparations -- pacing, saving, and innovating. With tragic exceptions generated by violence, disease and poverty, lives worldwide are lengthening, becoming more like a marathon than a short sprint.
For debate: Longevity challenges youth to acquire foresight and an ability to blend the best elements of innovation and tradition. Foresight and flexibility in the face of change can be fostered in many ways using local and national resources, including school curricula, community consultations, radio and television debates and dramatic productions that could stimulate enquiry and imagination about "lifestyles for longevity".
Childhood: the cradle of longevity
The physical, intellectual and emotional foundations of long life are laid in childhood. Consistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, much is being said and done about the material and intellectual needs of children; the emotional needs are known to be equally important.
Beyond the full range of physical, intellectual and emotional needs of children, there is a need for the presence of calm, insightful and supportive adults. Interactions with such adults can impart knowledge about how to be and how to live together. This knowledge can cultivate resilience and trust, independence and interdependence, which are qualities to guide and sustain an individual throughout the lifecourse.
In industrializing societies, work tends to dominate the major portion of the parental day, week and year curtailing time fathers and mothers have for their children and other family members.
With urbanization and migration, age-segregation increases so that children have fewer opportunities for knowing elders including their grandparents.
For debate: Flexible work scheduling is necessary to allow parents more time with their children. Multi-generational design of the living environment is necessary to allow for children and elders to encounter each other. Grandparents and other elders can often fill in time and care gaps left by busy parents and teachers. Older persons can be trained in emotional counselling for children at risk, including street children, orphans and troubled or abused children.
Measures to support more age-interactions in family, neighbourhood and society at large could help ensure that childhood is truly the cradle of longevity.
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