Will Boomers Be Any Different? - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

Image by Christchurch City Libraries via Flickr

By PAULA SPAN

Raise your hand if your elderly parents issue one of the following proclamations whenever you try to persuade them to accept some sort of assistance — wearing an emergency-response pendant, say, or hiring a home care aide, or moving into assisted living when remaining at home becomes too difficult to manage.

1) “It’s too expensive” — though you know they could afford it.

2) “I can manage on my own” — though a history of falls, missed medications and poor nutrition suggests otherwise.

3) “I don’t want a stranger in my house.”

4) “The only way I’m leaving here is feet first.”

Not every senior needs help, and not every senior who needs it resists it. But the number one question I encounter when I speak to family caregivers is how to nudzh old people into adapting to increasing disability when they are, to be a tad euphemistic, “fiercely independent.”

It makes me wonder how much of this apparently widespread intransigence has to do with a particular cohort — anyone over 80 was shaped by the Depression, whether they were old enough to remember it or not — and how much of it is intrinsic to aging itself.

In 20 or so years, when we baby boomers are entering the ranks of the “old-old” ourselves, will we be any different?
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