A Demographic Version of Astrology

"(...) the danger is that generational labels could be nothing more than a demographic version of astrology, using arbitrary dates to form judgements about individual personality and needs."
Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton

photograph by Slim Aarons via

Can I Keep My Job? Adult Children Caring for their Elderly Parents

In the 1970s, studies started showing to what extent public services can support parents when it comes to combining caring for their children with participation in employment. Only in the 1990s did researchers begin to focus on the impact adult children's caring for their elderly parents can have on their participation in the labour market. According to research, the need (or wish) to care for older parents can lead to adult children losing their jobs, more absence from work, increased use of part-time work or more difficulty concentrating at work (due to being worried) and negative effects on productivity, promotion and salary.

Adult children are important care providers, most of the non-professional care is provided by daughters of older people. In other words, a great many women "in their fifties and sixties are now both working and having to care for their parents", hence "more likely than men to withdraw completely from the labour market" or work fewer hours - either because they need the time to care for the parent(s) or because of health problems resulting from attempts to combine care work with job. "Public expenditures on eldercare appear to affect both intergenerational support and female labour market participation."

Gautun and Brett (2017) investigated the connection between adult children's attendance at work and public care services for older people. 

We test the hypothesis that the detrimental effect on attendance at work of having an older parent in need of care is moderated (reduced) by the parent’s use of a public nursing homes, possibly also by home care services.

The study was carried out in Norway (n = 529, employees aged 45 to 65). A majority of respondents (80%) had provided support to their parent(s) in mostly practical form, e.g. purchases or transportation. 16% ha given nursing assistance. 58% of those reporting to have helped their parent(s) during the past year said that it was difficult to combine care and work. 

The results are interesting and probably not extremely surprising:

Institutional care for older people in need of care (i.e. nursing homes) was associated with improved work attendance among their children—their daughters in particular. Data also indicated a moderating effect: the link between the parents’ reduced health and reduced work attendance among the children was weaker if the parent lived in a nursing home. However, the results were very different for home-based care: data indicated no positive effects on adult children’s work attendance when parents received non-institutionalised care of this kind. Overall, the results suggest that extending public care service to older people can improve their children’s ability to combine work with care for parents. However, this effect seems to require the high level of care commonly provided by nursing homes. Thus, the current trend towards de-institutionalising care in Europe (and Norway in particular) might hamper work attendance among care-giving adult children, women in particular. Home care services to older people probably need to be extended if they are intended as a real alternative to institutional care.

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- Gautun, H. & Brett, C. (2017). Caring too much? Lack of public services to older people reduces attendance at work among their children. European Journal of Ageing, 14, 155-166,, link
- photograph by Dorothea Lange (1938) via

Generational Narratives about Climate Change Concerns

Young people are concerned about the anthropogenic climate change; a "Generation Climate" is created on one side with older people as antagonists on the other side resulting in the perpetuation of the myth of a generational divide with young climate heroes and old climate villains. The perception of a generation gap "is further strengthened by young climate activists capturing the media's and public's attention" (Poortinga, 2023). In fact, a "fake generational war over the climate crisis has distorted public thinking" promoting the idea "that young people are ecowarriors, battling against selfish older generations" - an idea that is now well established in the environment movement and has "crept into so many discussions about climate concerns that it's become an accepted truth" (via).

For their analysis, Poortinga et al. (2023) used data from three representative surveys conducted in the UK in 2020, 2021 and 2022. The authors studied climate-related beliefs, risks perceptions and emotions and came to the conclusion that there were no generational differences in climate-related beliefs and that generational differences were rather found in climate-related emotions. In addition, a diminishing generational gap from 2020 to 2021 and 2022 was found. Older generations were also more likely to believe that we are already feeling the effects of climate change. 

There are however questions regarding the nature and the size of the generation gap, as effects have not been observed consistently. Age-related differences have been found in beliefs about the reality, causes, and impacts of climate change, with older individuals being more likely to express climate sceptical views than younger ones3,10–12; and there is evidence that younger people are more concerned about the environment in general13,14 and climate change in particular2,15. Furthermore, younger age groups may be more likely to experience climate-related emotions, such as worry, anger and guilt16, as well as climate-related anxiety4. However, other research only found small or absent age differences17. For example, Shi and colleagues (2016) report that age was not significant in explaining climate concern in five out of six countries; and a meta-analysis of research published between 1970 and 2010 concluded that age effects for environmental concern, values and commitment were negligible18.

The differentiation between the constructs beliefs, risk perceptions and emotions is important when studying generational patterns as ...

(...) there is a hierarchical relationship between climate-related beliefs, risk perceptions and emotions. The lower components of the model are a necessary but insufficient condition for the higher components. While someone can recognise the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the person may not perceive it as a threat or experience any climate related emotions. On the other hand, in order to experience climate-related emotions, one has to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and poses a threat. As such, it is important to clearly distinguish between the different components, as generational differences may exist for some but not for others.

In other words, age is of no relevance for climate change scepticism but plays a role when it comes to threat perceptions, worry and emotions. Similarly, the survey carried out by Duffy (2021) in the UK also shows that the generational divide is a myth. According to the findings, older people are more likely than younger ones to feel that acting in environmentally conscious ways will make a difference. Younger generations feel more fatalistice about the impact on actions taken. One third of "gen Z" (under 24) and "millennials" (25-40) say there was no point changing their behaviour since it will not make any difference anyway, while only 22% of "gen X" (41-56) and 19% of "baby boomers" (57-75) express this view. Twice as many "baby boomers" than "gen Z" had boycotted a company in the past twelve months for environmental reasons.

Another survey, carried out by RestLess in the UK among people aged 50 and over, found that about two-thirds want ministers "to move faster on climate initiatives" accepting that products and services would be more expensive over time or more difficult to access. One of the conclusions was that "midlifers feel a huge sense of responsibility for the health of the planet and their role in reducing climate change". Only a minority of older people is unconcerned about the climate crisis (via). Nevertheless, younger people keep underestimating how worried older people are about climate change. 

In 2021, a project started in Ireland, the results were published this year. According to the study, the generational myths do have a negative impact as they make "young people more worried about climate change, without any corresponding increase in willingness to engage in climate action". A sample (n = 500) of people aged 16 zo 24 read a text about climate change. Half of the participants read a text that emphasised generational differences (causes of climate change, exposure to its effects), the other half a text that was neutral in terms of generational aspects. Afterwards, participants answered questions about their perceptions and their willingness to engage in climate action. When young people were provided with accurate information on how worried older people (here defined above 40) in fact were, their attitudes changed. Their belief in older people's willingness to show climate action increased and so did their own willingness (via). And collective action is exactly what we need now.

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- Duffy, B. (2021). Who cares about climate change? Attitudes across the generations. New Scientist
- Poortinga, W., Demski, C. & Steentjes, K. (2023). Generational differences in climate-related risk perceptions and emotions in the UK. communications. earth & environment, 1-8.
- photograph by William Eggleston via

Connected by Generations. By Kathleen Woodward.

"I was 10 and on vacation with my father's parents. My grandfather stayed behind (he always did) while my grandmother and I went down to the beach. It was too cold to swim, it was our first day, and so we walked along the water's edge to the rocks at the far end of the shore. I remember climbing those rocks for hours. What we had forgotten, of course, was the deceptive coolness of the sun. We returned to the hotel, our skin painfully, desperately burned. We could put nothing against our bodies. Not a single sheet. We lay still and naked on the twin beds, complaining, laughing, talking. Two twinned, different, sunburned bodies - the body of a 10-year old girl and the body of a 62-year-old woman. 

To my mind's retrospective eye it is crucial that this scene is not a story of the mother and the daughter, a story whose psychoanalytic plot revolves around identification and separation, intimacy and distance (...). Instead it is a story of an older woman (surely a missing person in psychoanalysis) and a young girl who are separated by some fifty years. Yet I do not want to say that the two of them are divided by generations. Rather, they are somehow connected by them." (Woodward , 1995:97)

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- Woodward, K. (1995). Tribute to the Older Woman. Psychoanalysis, feminism, and ageism. in M. Featherstone and A. Wernick (eds) Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, pp. 79-96. London: Routledge.

- photograph by Martin Parr via

Quoting Matilda Joslyn Gage

"The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one-thousand generations back of them… Millions of women dead and gone are speaking through us today."

Matilda Joslyn Gage (1880)

photograph by Reg Innell (1970, Women's liberation demonstration at Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto) via

The Grandmother Stereotype and the Fog of Irrelevance

A grandmother is seen as a one-dimensional being since becoming one "subsumes everything else in your life under a fog of irrelevance". When Hillary Clinton, for instance, became a grandmother she was asked when she would "please go quietly into the night" (via). This attitude is there despite the fact that grandparents represent a bigger chunk of the population than ever before and despite many of them being in the labour force. Let's face it: "The idea of Grandma baking the occasional batch of cookies doesn't match today's realities." (via).

There's nothing new about grandmother stereotypes. Remember Little Red Riding Hood? A wolf swallows up sickly granny in her cap and nightgown and climbs into her bed to wait for the dutiful child to appear so he can gobble her up too, along with her basket of goodies. In the more benign resolutions of the tale, a friendly woodcutter cuts open the wolf, and grandmother and child emerge unscathed. Presumably granny then retires to her rocking chair and is transformed into another common stereotype – the plump, kindly old woman in her dotage, sitting with her knitting in an isolated corner of the room. Sandra Martin

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photograph by David Godlis via

Dementia, Depression, Unattractive, Selfish. Younger People's Stereotypical Perceptions of Older People

According to a survey (n = 2.000) carried out in the U.K., "millennials" (here defined as people aged 18 to 34) have the most negative attitudes to older people and ageing in general. The findings showed a clear pattern indicating that attitudes to ageing become more positive as the age of respondent increases. Or: It becomes more negative as their age decreases. 40% of those age 18 to 34 believe "there isn't any way to escape getting dementia as you age", 25% think "it is normal to be unhappy and depressed when you are old" and 24% believe "older people can never really be thought of as attractive". 44% of 18-24 year olds agreed that in "elections, most older people just vote for their own selfish interests rather than the wellbeing of the younger generation and society as a whole". Respondents aged 18-34 said "old age" would begin at 53, those over 65 said it would start at 64.



People also seem to be living in age segregated places as 64% don't have a single friendship with an age gap of 30 years or more. Cultural or ethnic backgrounds play a major role since those identifying as from a black ethnic background showed an "overwhelmingly more positive" attitude.
Another finding was the "general perception that women faced more barriers growing older than men" as their physical attractiveness allegedly deteriorated more with age (Royal Society for Public Health, 2018).

- Royal Society for Public Health (2018). That Age Old Question. How Attitudes to Ageing Affect Our Health and Wellbeing. London, LINK
- photographs by Vivian Maier via (1977) and via (Chicago 1975)

Quoting Viktor Frankl

“But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.”
Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning



Viktor Emil Frankl (1905-1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist, neurologist, and the founder of logotherapy and existentialism. After the "Anschluss" in 1938, Frankl was no longer allowed to treat "Arian" patients. In 1941, he married Tilly Grosser who was forced to abort their child and deported to Ghetto Theresienstadt in 1942. Frankl's father died in the ghetto in 1943, his brother was killed in Auschwitz where his 65-year-old mother was immediately murdered in the gas chamber. His wife died in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen aged 24. Frankl was transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, then to another concentration camp and in March 1945 to Dachau where he was liberated in April 1945 by US-American troops. After all these experiences Frankl published his book "Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager" (literally "Nevertheless, say yes to life") known in English by the title "Man's Search for Meaning" in 1946 (via and via).

In the last camp he comes down with typhoid fever. To avoid fatal collapse during the nights he keeps himself awake by reconstructing his book manuscript on slips of paper stolen from the camp office. On April 27 the camp is liberated by U.S. troops. In August Frankl returns to Vienna, where he learns, within a span of a few days, about the death of his wife, his mother and his brother who has been murdered in Auschwitz together with his wife.
Viktor Frankl Institut

“From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”—and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.”
Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

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photograph via