Navigating Aging: Preparation, Impact, and Positive Perspectives

Aging as a Project: Early Preparation

Become aware of the attention given to aging. Be the master of your old age and even death. Prepare by knowing the real condition of the elderly, maintaining a critical attitude towards the social perception of old age, and cultivating your desires.

Impact of Aging

Chronic Diseases

Chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus (DM), osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and cerebrovascular accident (CVA) can significantly impact aging.

Psychological Loss

Fluid intelligence may decline.

Social Changes

Retirement, loss of family and friends, and changes in social networks are common social changes associated with aging. Rethinking existential death is also important.

Needs to Pay Attention To

The loss of work and retirement create needs for activities and alternative uses of time. Retirement also demands specific health cures and more frequent use of different products and wellness resources. Individuals and communities need to embrace changes in family dynamics related to the reorganization of time and new activities or changes in the family life cycle (Rosow 1967).

Positive Perspectives of Gerontology

Increased awareness of the positive biopsychosocial conditions of human aging and the population. Prevention and health promotion in older people are viewed within the health sciences. Incorporate elements of positive psychology in socio-interventions, focusing on successful adaptation and the competitive strength of the individual and the family.

Family

Stressors

Cognitive Plan

Meaning given to ambiguity and uncertainty. Unpredictability and emotional instability.

Language

Anxiety, fear of pain, suffering, family unit problems, frustration, fear of death, guilt, anger, and sadness.

Daily Activities Plan

Increase in work demands, shift in gender roles and responsibilities, giving up certain dynamic activities.

Interpersonal Relations Plan

  • Isolation
  • Increased interest in and exchange of emotional support and material dependence
  • Overprotection and ambiguity of roles and rules
  • Increase or decrease of tensions
  • Redefinition of relationships

Health Beliefs and Processes

The perception of an event differs from one individual to another. How a person experiences a situation is conditioned by their own unique structure. The individual’s belief system determines their perception of reality. Individual beliefs, family systems, and the sociocultural context of health professionals all play a role.

Pricing Model Calgaray Family

Internal Structure

Family composition, range, sub-genre, sexual orientation, and boundaries.

External Structure

Extended family structure, larger systems.

Context

Ethnicity, social class, religion/spiritual environment.

Genogram

Tools of assessment and intervention, the main elements of the role.

Development

Labor unions, stages, and connections: older families.

Instrumental Performance

Activities of daily living routines.

Expressive Function

Communication (verbal and nonverbal), emotional communication, roles, influence, beliefs, alliances, and coalitions to solve problems.

Development Assessment

Interview

Relationship of trust, preparation environment, respecting the rhythm of the family.

Intervention

Genogram, force survey questions, systems skill, and success.

Retirement

Retirement from the working world for having reached the age required by law or by being unable to work.

Retirement as:

The process of transition from working life to a life without paid work. A period of life that stretches from quitting the job.

Process of Adaptation to Retirement

Retirement attitudes of rejection, as an opportunity, or ambivalent.