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.
Living with someone with a mental or physical illness can cause chronic strain and impact the health of others in the house, the researchers note. It often means that everyone in the house becomes a caregiver and, as the pair writes, “the effects of being a caregiver are generally negative, associated with severe negative and physical outcomes”.
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Category(s):Family Problems
Source material from British Psychological Society
