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Sessile seniors – and other myths
An expert on what it means to grow old debunks five stubborn misconceptions about ageing.
By Patrick Avenell
Bob Knight is an expert in ageing. He has a PhD in clinical psychology from Indiana University and is the author of books including Psychotherapy with Older Adults. He is also the editor of Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.
Knight is firmly across what it means to be a senior from an empirical research perspective. That’ s why he’ s keen to set the record straight on a number of misconceptions about what it means to be a senior citizen. Here, he discusses five prominent myths and the truths they mask.
1Older people are sad, cranky and crotchety
“ One of the things we know about later life is that as people get older, the balance of positive and negative emotion skews more towards the positive. The group that scores the highest on measures of sadness and depressed mood is people in their 20s, and then that tends to go down across adult life, at least up into the 60s and 70s, and then there’ s a slight upturn, but never quite back to the 20-year-old level.
2Older people are not interested in physical relationships
“ There’ s a general resistance of thinking about older people as fully sexual beings, and I think it’ s often surprising to people when surveys come out that show that people are still sexually active up into their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond. There seems to be a natural tendency of people not to want to think about their parents, and I guess by extension, their grandparents as having sex and being sexually active, and then that kind of generalises to older people as a whole.
“ If you’ re with the same partner as you’ ve always had, then there’ s no particular reason for sexuality to die out just because you’ re getting older.”
3All old people are lonely
“ It turns out that when you do research the group that feels the loneliest is young people in their 20s, and that older adults are not necessarily lonelier than middle-aged people.
“ Another line of research suggests that older adults often have a smaller number of people in their regular social contacts or in their close social network, but at the same time, people continue to be happy and satisfied with life. We tend to, starting around age 30, start trimming our social contacts and our social networks. People have smaller networks but what remains is the people they actually feel close to emotionally.”
4People in retirement homes are inactive and don’ t get around much“ Generally speaking, at any one time, only about 5 – 10 per cent of the older adult population is living in retirement homes. But I think because they’ re settings that only have older people in them, and because a lot of the media coverage of things that go on in later life often centre around issues and problems with aged care, when you think of older adults, that’ s the first thing you tend to think of, and they kind of overlook the much larger number of older adults still living in age-integrated settings and regular neighbourhoods.”
5No one wants to end up in an aged-care facility“ It’ s an individual’ s decision. I think some people, for a variety of reasons, really like to be in a more age-segregated setting and be around people their own age, and like some of the activities and regular interactions that come about in those settings. Other people prefer to be in an age-integrated environment or continue living in the place they’ ve always lived in. On the whole, it’ s a relatively small percentage of people who prefer age-segregated living, but it’ s an important aspect of our society and certainly a valid choice for people to make.” ■
6 agedcareinsite. com. au