HANG ON TIGHT – OLD AGE IS COMING
The late, great Bette Davis had it right when she said that “Old age is no place for sissies.”
Life for seniors can be challenging as health and other age-related issues become more prevalent as people grow older. A recent report noted that increasing numbers of Canadians will not have the financial means to retire at age 65. The Broadbent Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank reported that half of Canadian couples between the ages of 55 and 64 have no employer pension and most of those don’t have adequate savings to last more than a year into retirement. That’s bad news for the almost 14 per cent of Saskatchewan’s population that is aged 65 and older and for those who are approaching retirement age. And, while the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code protects against age discrimination, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that gray hair can be a turn-off for employers, tightening the financial screws even further.
Whether or not those statistics are a factor, it is obvious that much of the advertising older adults see and hear, and even the news stories, are often geared to young people. In today’s fast-paced world, where everyone is constantly barraged by a stream of advertising, entertainment and pseudo-news geared to the buying public, older adults may feel increasingly left out.
Linda Anderson, former board member of Saskatchewan Seniors Mechanism (SSM), has taken a break from the boardroom to spearhead a project to examine whether modern media are, in fact, skewed to a young audience. “People are not conscious of it; they can’t swear there is a bias, but there does seem to be one. Our society has become quite youth oriented and it just does not recognize the wisdom, the energy, the experience of older adults,” she says.
SSM has received a Pan-Canadian grant from New Horizons for Seniors and is working with the Alzheimer Society, the Red Cross, the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit (SPHERU), the Fédération des aînés fransaskois and the Regina Lifelong Learning Centre on a three-year plan for Creating a Culture of Inclusion. “The whole project is about reducing isolation,” says Anderson. “If you reduce isolation, we know from studies of various kinds, that older adults do better if they do not feel alone.”
Anderson says the issue of age in the media is a major component of the plan. “Older adults receive messages conveyed by society in many ways, including the news media. These messages reveal societal attitudes that have an effect on how older adults perceive themselves and their value within their communities,” she says.
The first year of the Media and Ageism Project will be devoted to organizing and conducting media monitoring to gather data on the messages carried by Saskatchewan’s news media, including newspapers, radio and television. The monitoring will be done by a group of trained volunteers who will use common response forms as they monitor the various media for items that are about, or refer to, older adults. In addition to content, the volunteers will also examine where the story is placed, and will consider whether there are subliminal messages, as well as the feelings the stories evoke. The results will be analyzed and the data will be used to plan ways to influence the media to be aware of attitudes towards older adults and to reduce negative stereotypes and assumptions.
“Based on personal experience, I predict that there will be data gathered that illustrates an abundance of overt and subliminal messages about seniors/older adults — that they are needy, frail, costly, are clogging the health systems and are basically a problem for society rather than being vibrant, knowledgeable, energetic, wise assets to society,” Anderson says.
The growing number of seniors in the population know which description is most accurate and while they await the results of the SSM study, they may want to remember another piece of sage advice by the unflappable Ms. Davis: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” The younger folks might want to Google.