Growing Up With Grandparents In The House Can Lead To More Negative Attitudes Towards The Elderly

By Emma Young What happens if you grow up with a grandparent living in your home? Does the prolonged contact counter prejudices, biases and stereotypes of the elderly? Or might it instead encourage negative perceptions of older people as being slow, angry or sickly, for example? These are important questions, partly because in some countries, though not all, an increasing number of elderly people are moving in with family members. In the US, for example, 15% of older adults are now living in someone else’s household, up from 7% in 1995. Now a new paper, published in Social Psychology, by Brian T Smith and Kelly Charlton at the University of North Carolina, suggests that this trend could be causing undesirable outcomes: people in the study who had grown up with an elderly person had significantly lower opinions of the elderly than those who had not. However, these respondents did at least report less anxiety around their own ageing process. Smith and Charlton studied 309 Americans, all recruited online. Of these, 194 reported growing up with an older adult — and 80 of these people said that the older adult in their home had suffered from a serious illness. All the participants completed a series of surveys that explored, among other things, their current levels of contact with elderly people, the positivity (or otherwise) of this contact, their general attitudes towards elderly people, and also their anxieties about growing old themselves. The analysis revealed that peopl...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Health Source Type: blogs