Aging and society
has a significant impact on society. People of different ages and genders tend to differ in many aspects, such as legal and social responsibilities, outlooks on life, and self-perceptions. Young people tend to have fewer legal privileges, they are more likely to push for political and social change, to develop and adopt new technologies, and to need education. Older people have different requirements from society and government, and frequently have differing values as well, such as for property and pension rights. Older people are also more likely to vote, and in many countries the young are forbidden from voting. Thus, the aged have comparatively more, or at least different, political influence.
In different societies, age may be viewed or treated differently. For example, age may be measured starting from conception or birth, starting at either zero or age one. Transitions such as reaching puberty, age of majority, or retirement are often socially significant. The concepts of successful aging and healthy aging refer to both social and physical aspects of the aging process.
Cultural variations
Arbitrary divisions set to mark periods of life may include: juvenile, early adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood. More casual terms may include "teenagers", "tweens", "twentysomething", "thirtysomething", etc. as well as "vicenarian", "tricenarian", "quadragenarian", etc.The age of an adult human is commonly measured in whole years since the day of birth. Fractional years, months, or even weeks may be used to describe the ages of children and infants for finer resolution. The time of day the birth occurred is not commonly considered. In some cultures, there are other ways to express age. For example, some cultures measure age by counting years, including the current year, while others count years without including it. It could be said for the same person that he is twenty years old or that he is in the twenty-first year of his life. In Russian, the former expression is generally used. Still, the latter has restricted usage: it is used for the age of a deceased person in obituaries and for the age of an adult when it is desired to show him/her older than he/she is. Other cultures that express age differently may not use years elapsed since birth at all. Inuit culture is an example in which birthdays are not celebrated because maturity is not signified in terms of years. The Navajo culture is another in which age is not counted through years elapsed from birth. In this case, age is measured through certain milestones in a person's life, such as the first time they laugh.
In cultures where age is not measured by years since birth, most individuals do not know how old they are in years. People in these cultures may find more importance in other aspects of their birth, such as the season, agricultural practices, or spiritual connections taking place when they were born. A culture may also choose to place a greater emphasis on family lineage than age, as is done in Mayan society. A Mayan adult would not determine a child's responsibility and status in terms of age by years, but instead by relative seniority to others in the family or community.
The main purpose of counting age in terms of years from birth is to conveniently group individuals by age, as is needed in industrialized society. The medical practices and compulsory schooling that resulted from industrialization factored largely into the need to count age in terms of years since birth. Even in Westernized societies such as the United States, age in terms of years since birth did not begin until the mid-1800s.
Depending on cultural and personal philosophy, ageing can be seen as an undesirable phenomenon, reducing beauty and bringing one closer to death, or as an accumulation of wisdom, a mark of survival, and a status worthy of respect. In some cases, numerical age is important, whereas others find the stage in life that one has reached to be more important.
East Asian age reckoning is different from that found in Western culture. Traditional Chinese culture uses a different ageing method, called Xusui with respect to common ageing which is called Zhousui. According to Luo Zhufeng, the Xusui method, people are born at age 1, not age 0, possibly because conception is already considered to be the start of the life span and possibly because the number '0' was not historically present in Ancient China, and another difference is the ageing day: Xusui grows up at the Spring Festival, while Zhousui grows up at one's birthday. In parts of Tibet, age is counted from conception i.e. one is usually 9 months old when one is born.
Age in prenatal development is normally measured in gestational age, taking the last menstruation of the mother as a point of beginning. Alternatively, fertilisation age, beginning from fertilisation can be taken.
Legal
Most legal systems define a specific age for when an individual is allowed or obliged to do particular activities. These age specifications include voting age, drinking age, age of consent, age of majority, age of criminal responsibility, marriageable age, age of candidacy, and mandatory retirement age. Admission to a movie, for instance, may depend on age according to a motion picture rating system. A bus fare might be discounted for the young or old. Each nation, government and non-government organisation has different ways of classifying age.Similarly, in many countries in jurisprudence, the defense of infancy is a form of defence by which a defendant argues that, at the time a law was broken, they were not liable for their actions and thus should not be held liable for a crime. Many courts recognise that defendants who are considered to be juveniles may avoid criminal prosecution on account of their age and in borderline cases the age of the offender is often held to be a mitigating circumstance.
Political
Older people have different requirements from society and government, and frequently have differing values as well, such as for property and pension rights. Older people are also more likely to vote, and in many countries the young are forbidden from voting. Thus, the aged have comparatively more, or at least different, political influence.Education tends to lose political significance for people as they age.
Coping and well-being
s have examined coping skills in the elderly. Various factors, such as social support, religion and spirituality, active engagement with life, and having an internal locus of control, have been proposed as being beneficial in helping people to cope with stressful life events in later life. Social support and personal control are possibly the two most important factors that predict well-being, morbidity and mortality in adults. Other factors that may link to well-being and quality of life in the elderly include social relationships, and health.Retirement, a common transition faced by the elderly, may have both positive and negative consequences. Individuals in different wings in the same retirement home have demonstrated a lower risk of mortality and higher alertness and self-rated health in the wing where residents had greater control over their environment, though personal control may have less impact on specific measures of health. Social control, perceptions of how much influence one has over one's social relationships, shows support as a moderator variable for the relationship between social support and perceived health in the elderly and may positively influence coping in the elderly.
Religion
Religion is an important factor used by the elderly in coping with the demands of later life and appears more often than other forms of coping later in life. Religiosity is a multidimensional variable; while participation in religious activities in the sense of participation in formal and organised rituals may decline, it may become a more informal, but still important aspect of life such as through personal or private prayer.Self-rated health
Positive self-perception of health has been correlated with higher well-being and reduced mortality in the elderly. Various reasons have been proposed for this association; people who are objectively healthy may naturally rate their health better than that of their ill counterparts, though this link has been observed even in studies which have controlled for socioeconomic status, psychological functioning and health status. This finding is generally stronger for men than women, though the pattern between genders is not universal across all studies and some results suggest sex-based differences only appear in certain age groups, for certain causes of mortality and within a specific sub-set of self-ratings of health.Paradox of ageing
Seniors' subjective health remains relatively stable, while objective health worsens with age. Furthermore, it seems that the perceived health improves with age when objective health is controlled in the equation. This phenomenon is known as the paradox of ageing. People's expectations concerning health co-evolve with the health norms surrounding one's age. Elderly people often associate their functional and physical decline with the normal ageing process. The elderly may actually enhance their perception of their own health through social comparison; for instance, the older people get, the more they may consider themselves in better health than their same-aged peers. Hence, the older a person becomes and the more their actual health declines, the greater the potential role is for social comparison processes to create a gap between a person's objective and subjective health.Healthcare
Many societies in Western Europe and Japan have ageing populations. While the effects on society are complex, there is a concern about the impact on healthcare demand. The large number of suggestions in the literature for specific interventions to cope with the expected increase in demand for long-term care in ageing societies can be organised under four headings: improve system performance; redesign service delivery; support informal caregivers; and shift demographic parameters.However, the annual growth in national health spending is not mainly due to increasing demand from ageing populations, but rather has been driven by rising incomes, costly new medical technology, a shortage of health care workers and informational asymmetries between providers and patients. Several health problems become more prevalent as people get older. These include mental health problems as well as physical health problems, especially dementia.
Even so, it has been estimated that population ageing only explains 0.2 percentage points of the annual growth rate in medical spending of 4.3 percent since 1970. In addition, certain reforms to the Medicare system in the United States decreased elderly spending on home health care by 12.5 percent per year between 1996 and 2000. This would suggest that the impact of ageing populations on health care costs is not inevitable.
In United States prisons, medical costs for an ageing inmate could be above $100 per day as of July 2007, while typical inmates cost $33 per day. Most States DOCs report spending more than 10 percent of the annual budget on elderly care. That is expected to rise over the next 10–20 years. Some states have talked about releasing ageing inmates early.