Aging And The Life Cycle Analysis

“Aging and the Life Cycle” attempts to disrupt the standard understanding of age as a biological factor, as it is unfolded as a social construct wherein gender, race, context, class, profession and other factors intersect to determine attitudes towards people of a certain age and creating ideas such as: middle-aged women should marry older men (Karp, Yoles and Vann 2004), children should play with dolls, grandmothers should be kind etc.… While the authors do capture its complexities, the chapter gives the impression that age, and age related behaviors, develop primarily to meet the expectations of society, and that it is society that creates the terms and frequency of said development. However, building on the arguments of Karp, Yoles and …show more content…
They exemplified how someone coming from an upper-class part of society would be unlikely to go through the lifecycle at the same time as an impoverished person. Here it occurred to me that the graduation to a new stage in the life cycle (Karp, Yoles and Vann2004) is not necessarily predetermined by society, but is rather an admission of economic and social distress, in which people must develop in order to survive a socially imbalanced and economically driven society. For example, the cultural expectation that teenagers should get jobs is one that applies to all western adolescence, and yet only youth of particular class, circumstance, and often gender, take it upon themselves to fulfill the traditional image of “young, part-time student struggling to pay for tuition and movie dates”, and venture out into the world of blue collars and bad tippers. Like many other age “land marks”, such as braces, drivers licences, and parenthood, working is not an act of fulfilling the social construct of adolescence, or submitting to ageist pressure, but rather done in the name of survival: a move against economic and social …show more content…
From this, we can deduce that richer people go through the life cycle slower because they have more flexibility and power in terms of when they take on norms that mark maturity and growth; they have the flexibility to reject, postpone, and defy age related behaviors, such as working, because they are not necessary for survival, and therefore construct their own childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle, and third age. In contrast, mature are-related behavior such as parenthood, house and car ownership, and marriage occurs sooner for those in economic disparity (Karp, Yoles and Vann2004), which implies that vast gap between the two classes in terms of the power they have over the definition and construction of