 Agewise © 2011 by Margaret Morganroth Gullette |
Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and prize-winning writer of nonfiction whose latest book is
Agewise (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and who also wrote
Aged by Culture. She is a member of PEN-America and a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. Gullette has also written for the
New York Times Magazine,
Nation,
Ms., the
Miami Herald, salon.com, and
American Prospect.
They flee from me who sometime did me seek –Sir Thomas Wyatt
My granddaughter Vivi is five-and-a-half. When she and I talk, sometimes she confides her important thoughts and displays the accomplishments she knows I’ll admire. I want her to feel all her life long that her sturdy little body has sacred integrity, that living is desirable and precious, that at every age the life course can be blessed. I want her to go on trusting me and thinking I am admirable.
You might think, Silly for this anti-ageist to worry about ageism battering that little one. Only five-and-a-half? She is way too young to be at risk.
Think again.
Not only our own life experience but societal influences determine thinking about aging – and especially children’s behaviors toward older people. Whatever else we are, if we are grandparents, we are also older people, and possibly the oldest in the family. And even if we are the heads of our families, ageism can drive younger people – even children – away from us.
 Photo by David Gullette |
By age six or eight, Vivi may no longer sit as close to an older adult (even me!) as to a younger adult. (We know this from an interesting study done by Leora W. Isaacs and David J. Bearison called "
The Development of Children’s [Age] Prejudice." ) If Vivi starts paying less attention to me, it won't be because I have become nastier to her or have indicated less interest in her concerns. It could instead be because she has heard on many occasions that "old people" are ugly or sick or hard of hearing. She might learn to think that although I am kind, good, and friendly, old people
like me are uninteresting. Her manners might be affected. She might take on a dismissive tone.
Children learn that painful tone young these days – from the pert wise-guy children in movies and on TV. Respect for age used to prevent that tone from being used on grandparents. Using it with people like me may also have been picked up from other children whose parents are influenced by the ageism that saturates mainstream society.
What's Age Got to Do With It?
Ageism doesn't damage only people who are old or in their middle years. (It's a mistake to think that.) While Vivi is still "a little big girl," as she calls herself, ageism may undermine some of the basic lessons she is acquiring from her loving three-generation family. She will overhear condescending and disgusting stereotypes about others and, if she's like many other young Americans, believe them. Becca Levy, a psychologist at Yale, has a simple explanation: "There is no psychological need to defend against them when they apply only to others."
By college, if told she was competing on a test with "old" people, Vivi might confidently predict she'd do well against these "reassuringly inferior" others. (This conclusion comes from a well-designed study by Levy called "Improving Memory in Old Age.") By that age, Vivi may now dismiss some of her stereotypes (old people are hard of hearing) but have picked up others. The Internet is full of unchallenged ageist comments.
Vivi may hoard some of the bad stuff inside, to turn against herself later. The older she gets, the greater her exposure to decline thinking: the belief that the life course is a relentless set of losses beginning after youth. Decline ideology carries other noxious components. By the time her first job has her paying payroll taxes, she might doubt she'll ever receive Social Security because people she has been taught to call "the aging Boomers" are supposedly eating it up. At 18, she might believe – as so many young people do – that sex tails off after 30, and that it ends definitively for women at menopause. By 30, she may think wrinkles are ugly and be tempted to undo her innate bodily integrity by planning cosmetic surgery. By 45, her job may be endangered by her being considered "too old" for whatever she has learned to do well.
Decline thinking may taint Vivi's imagination, damage her perceptions, and spoil her expectations of life. Ageism may pollute her mind the way acid rain poisons lakes. She too may erroneously blame her own "aging."
Can Your Involvement Make a Difference?
My presence in Vivi's life has been important to her in many ways. Even though her family lives far away and our meetings are rare, I have tried to make the most of them.
On one visit, I taught her to run, and the word run. I taught her how to fill a spoon with sand and carry it level to a bucket without spilling. When she was very little, she didn't know how to deal with her occasional anger against her parents (which is normal) except by threatening to cut them with scissors. With the help of my mother, then in her nineties, who was brilliantly intuitive about child rearing, I decided one answer was to teach her to use scissors to cut paper. Vivi took to rubber cement and colored paper enthusiastically, and turned out collages like a natural artist.
This past summer I taught her to put her face under water gently, without fear. I believe in children learning to enjoy manual labor and do it well: Vivi and I painted the shed door yellow when she was three, and two summers later we did it again. Like the grandmother in Tove Jansson's wonderful novel, The Summer Book – the most sensitive book I know about good grandparenting – I sometimes know what Vivi needs to hear.
Perhaps most important, both her parents like my roles that I and my husband, Vivi's grandfather, play in her life. They talk us up a lot when we are not around. I am grateful, but nevertheless, I still don't feel safe myself or secure about her future, because ageist societal influences are so widespread and powerful.
Everywhere You Look
I refer to the stupid allure of so-called anti-aging medicine; mean-spirited attempts to weaken Social Security; media punditry that foments generational hatreds; a campaign against elders on Medicare getting the health care they need (which I call the "duty to die" campaign); and other causes that my book, Agewise, explores. Americans are being sideswiped by social changes that weaken consideration and care for age. Like others, I used to make the mistake of blaming "my aging" for the hits I took. Now I know better. Just because I have gray hairs and get Social Security is no reason to treat me badly, America.
This whole story of how our loved ones learn ageism is hard to take in. It's sad, threatening, and complex. It behooves us to worry about ageism affecting our grandchildren at even very young ages. These are not ordinary worries, like whether they are eating properly, doing too much homework, or playing enough outside.
I'm sorry if knowing this adds to your worries, but it should. Your adult children can take care of food and play, but our daughters and sons likely have a lot on their minds beside ageism. Much of the response to that is up to us.
Grandparents are a natural pro-aging and anti-ageist constituency – perhaps the best. By virtue of our loving-kindness, we have a deep and abiding interest in the proper development of our grandchildren, and in family harmony. We have a compelling, urgent interest in maintaining a respected position in the family as we grow older. Ageism is bad for our own health and mental health. Our well being depends on reversing dangerous ageist trends.
What can we do? If Vivi were to display ageist attitudes or behavior to me, a head-on attack on that particular remark or tone of voice would be meaningless to her. Her parents would understand my pain (or irritation, or injury) and suggest "politeness" to her (which is not the loving attitude I want) – but still not be able to make a dent in the attitudes and behaviors of her friends, their parents, or society at large.
We grandparents have a vested interested in strengthening the seniority systems of our nation and economy, doing whatever it takes to make growing older worthwhile for everyone. That means, to begin with, understanding the importance of midlife employment, providing healthcare to everyone under 65, and funding the enforcement of age-discrimination statutes.
This is a big struggle that we will be taking on – much like the struggles against sexism, racism, and homophobia. It requires that we learn much more about ageism, teach others, and pick the battles in which we may be most successful confronting it. In every case, we take up our cudgels against ageism, not aging.
Find more insight on your generation from Grandparents.com:
© 2011 Margaret Morganroth Gullette
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