Why Do Adults Treat Aging Parents Like Kids?

As the American population grows collectively older, a good deal of attention has been focused on age-related bias in employment, the media, health care, and popular culture.

But while the problem of ageism may be well documented in those areas, there appears to be much less awareness among scholars, journalists, and policy makers of its impact on the family.

So notes Stacey Gordon, senior fellow at the Center for Health and Aging Innovation (CHAI) at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. Gordon’s career-long interest in bringing the problem to the fore of scholarship and public awareness led her to research and write the recent paper in the Journal of Gerontological Social Work coauthored by Ernest Gonzales, an NYU Silver professor and CHAI’s director.

The study describes ageism directed at older adults as a phenomenon akin to racism and sexism. Rather than just another form of familial tension or disagreement, the sources of ageist attitudes and behaviors run deep in American society, powered by norms and traditions about the roles that older family members play, negative stereotypes, and false beliefs. Siblings and friends communicate age bias, consciously or unconsciously. So do older adults and parents, who often internalize them. And the impact on families is insidious, even toxic, says Gordon.

“Common stereotypes by young and old alike can include a belief that older family members are dependent, physically and cognitively impaired, lonely, deaf, lacking vitality or interest, asexual, and helpless,” she and Gonzales write in their paper. But whether kept under wraps or blurted out jokingly (“No one over 75 should have an iPhone!” is one such micro-aggression, she explains), ageism dishonors an older person’s lifetime of skills, experiences, and knowledge. It chips away at their autonomy, power, and self-esteem.

In 2020, Gordon published another paper, in Clinical Social Work Journal, and this foundational article became what Gordon calls “the little paper that could,” receiving more than 5,500 downloads—and demonstrating that there is indeed a great deal of interest in the topic of family ageism, and in addressing it.

Importantly, the paper introduced the positive results that are possible when family members are able to step back and use a “critical consciousness” to understand the ways in which the larger social context and structural forces affect how older family members are valued and treated, and how family interactions and problems are affected.

“Knowing that a supportive family member is present, reliable, and consistent whether close by or afar,” she writes, “can have a positive impact on an older adult’s attitude and expectations about their own mental and physical health and can also provide older adults with a sense of hope and control of their future aging trajectory.”

Here, Gordon speaks about how a critical consciousness might be used to counter the perpetuation of negative stereotypes ingrained in many family units:

Q: How did you come to research family ageism?

A: I actually started out my social work career working with children. I was the parent of two toddlers when I shifted toward the field of gerontology and created a small practice in Manhattan. I subsequently taught at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, a class called “Aging and Mental Health,” and ended up teaching two more courses that I developed on aging and long-term care in the 21st century. I went on to help introduce the field of geriatric care management in Israel, and then returned to New York to earn my Doctorate in Social Welfare at NYU Silver (2021) as well as an Executive MPA at NYU Wagner (2025). Currently I am the associate executive director of older adult services at the Queens Community House in Forest Hills, New York, a settlement house marking its fiftieth year.

But it was very early in my work with families when a pediatrician for my child mentioned to me, “My mother needs an assessment because I’d like to put her in an assisted living facility.” That’s how he phrased it. But what did his mother want, I wondered? Where was her agency in the decision? In a way, the comment and my subsequent interaction with this doctor and so many other families sparked my concern about ageism in the family.

Q: You note in your new paper that family ageism has many sources but that it tends to be protective in intent, not malicious. Can you talk about that?

A: In my 2020 paper, I noted that “positive ageism” stems from positive intent to protect one’s older loved ones, and ranges from very small and seemingly innocuous behaviors. An example is using a high-pitched tone of voice with an older family member, something called “elderspeak.” Another example is an adult child ordering an item from a menu that they think is healthiest for their parent without consulting them—or more consequential actions like a family member making a decision to withhold medical information from their older loved one, or unilaterally choosing the type of medical treatment for an illness on their parent’s behalf. The fact that a doctor gives medical information to the adult child rather than the older parent is also a form of ageism and is actually illegal, but that’s for another paper.

All of these types of familial behaviors appear to be compassionate, but they have real-world consequences. They support the stereotype that older adults are needy and childlike, and can be detrimental, as they cause older adults to question their own capabilities and strengths and lower their self-esteem. I’m interested in understanding what sorts of things allow people to feel like they can be the boss of their parents. When a parent is vulnerable, why do adult children feel like they have to step in and make decisions for them rather than provide scaffolding supports, like we might do for a younger person? Of course we want to protect our loved ones, and we’d do this with a child. But older people are not children—they have a lifetime of experience they can call upon to make decisions, calling upon a lifetime of skills and learning, or what is known as crystallized intelligence, to put the pieces together.

Q: So the risk of being infantilized by one’s adult children is high?

A: In families of all types, you hear adult children saying, “It doesn’t matter what my mother wants, it’s what is good for me and my children.” Or, “I know what’s best for my loved ones.” But although this ageism isn’t intended to be malicious, it’s ingrained and comes from all of the negative messaging and fears about older people and getting older that we absorb from childhood —even from fairy tales like Cinderella or Snow White—and then at the macro level—all of the state and federal laws, policies and budget cuts, and financially incentivized health care that threaten those over the age of 65 who, by the way, will comprise 20% of the US population in the next five years.

Q: Is there a certain moment in a family’s life that these attitudes about older members of the family are most likely to occur?

A: When I started on my research on family ageism, some of my colleagues in the aging field expressed the views that the phenomenon, while real, wasn’t central, just part of the normal conflicts that occur in every family, especially those dealing with issues of caregiving for an aging parent.

What I found, however, was different: ageism in the family doesn’t start with caregiving decisions—it starts way earlier, and it’s structural and influences how we form opinions about our own aging and about older people. The stereotypes, however false, take hold and are reinforced throughout their lives. Some older people can indeed be scary, as portrayed in fairy tales, but so can some younger people. Older people are growing older, but everyone is growing older.

My research confirms that, as with sexism and racism, structural ageism is embedded in an eco-system where macro-level laws and policies shape societal attitudes, language, and culture that influence institutional practices like healthcare and workplace ageism, where both younger and older people experience ageism. This eco-system reaches the micro-level, where ageism shapes our thoughts, feelings, and ultimately our behaviors, such as the negative ways we may talk with our friends about growing older. These conversations between individuals and in our own thoughts often result in expressing ageism as a microaggression, such as “She’s lucky, looks so young for her age,” or “Don’t wear that, it makes you look old.”

There’s another important structural dimension. One of my questions for our work on ageism in the family is based on “social identity theory,” which posits that people prefer to identify with the “in-group,” which in this case is the young—and which is usually ascribed more positive traits in comparison to the “out-group,” the old. I’m particularly curious as to whether a connection exists between when a person starts to question whether they are still part of the young in-group or are moving into the old out-group. Is the adult child becoming more aware of how stereotypes of age might be ascribed to themselves? Are they experiencing ageism at their workplace? Are their teenage children starting to comment on how they don’t know how to use a new remote, or commenting on their increasingly gray hair? Perhaps this is the time when they begin to project their own discomfort with aging onto their older parents, so that they can feel they are in the “younger in-group” a little longer.

Q: What is known about the toxicity of being exposed to or internalizing negative attitudes about getting older?

A: A landmark study by researchers Levy, Slade, Kunkl, and Kasel found that, when compared to men and women who have negative attitudes about aging, older adults with more positive views lived 7.5 years longer on average than those with less positive views. Published in 2002, it was based on a survey of 660 adults aged 50 and above, showing what’s at stake when we consider the impact of positive attitudes on individual health, everything from walking speed to depression, dementia, and mortality.

Q: So is empathy the most important quality to combat ageism in the family?

A: Honestly, I think we’re in an empathy crisis in our society and the world right now. Learning about ways to have empathy toward people of all ages is a huge challenge. But there’s every reason that we need to empower older people to feel more comfortable in their own skin and in the ways they move through the world. Continued research can help us examine attitudes, policies, and resource allocations for older adults. Social workers and other mental health professionals can investigate their personal biases about older people and help their clients, both young and old, feel comfortable with their age and with the aging process. We can also promote intergenerational strategies to change the ways old and young people experience each other, like those we run at Queens Community House, where they work together to set mutually beneficial goals, share their resources, and develop meaningful programs.

Source: NYU

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This post was previously published on FUTURITY.ORG and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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