While longer life expectancy and more excellent health in later life are among the century’s shining successes in many parts of the world, these changes also pose significant challenges. Trends in longevity impact economic growth, employment, how families run, administrations’ and societies’ competence to deliver adequate services for older people, and the prevalence of long-term illness and incapacity. Increased longevity affects family life in that it decreases and delays fertility. According to demographers, sequential marriage and partnership produce more diverse connections of late-life family interactions than in the past. Longevity trends impact social work because they affect fiscal balance, savings and investment patterns, and labor supply shortages, all of which result in a decrease in growth in the economy. Others comprise well-being, social security schemes in the future, and the implications of these operations for funds and support from relevant authorities.
Different scholars argue that the period a person works pays taxes and saves significantly affects the consequences of population aging. I support this argument because many people work for very little due to extended periods of education and training in their early years and longer life expectancy. This longer life expectancy poses a danger to the sustainability of organizations that serve older people. If the trend to longer life persists without a matching increase in working life, the demand for these systems could become much more significant.
The practice of social work with older individuals is a fast expanding subject that encompasses a variety of settings. A social worker needs to understand that as a person reaches late adulthood, they may experience changes in perception and behavior. A reduction in speed with which one acquires information, retains, and retrieves it causes a decrease in memory. A decline in comprehension speed may harm the adolescent’s short-term memory capacity and the ability to absorb concepts.
An individual working with older adults must understand senior adult diversity awareness, sexuality, physical and psychological difficulties, varieties of dementia, substance misuse, dying concerns, housing issues, and the different care facilities. As a call to action, the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare highlighted 12 major problems for social workers (Hutchison, 2019). Ensuring healthy development for all youth that emphasizes psychological and psychosocial problem mitigation through primary health care is one of the 12 significant challenges.
Due to the ever-increasing population of older persons, there is a worldwide need for evidence‐based practice expertise across existing health and social care professions. Formal resources for elderly persons usually refer to compensated services provided for a person that needs them by a healthcare facility or an individual. Home-based nursing, community-based support, and residential treatment in the type of nursing homes are among the legal options available. Family does unpaid care, relatives, acquaintances, neighbors, adult day health, religious, or community programs are informal resources available.
I agree with the discussion of increased longevity and family life in late adulthood in Dimensions of human behavior, the changing life course textbook, because it entails facts about today. As evidenced by the case studies and objective life evidence, older persons do not live mainly in the past. Like everyone else’s, their daily lives include past, present, and future orientations. Older adults have more time behind them and shorter time ahead of them at different stages of their lives, but research consistently demonstrates that this importance placed on the past is fiction. Some popularly held assumptions about older persons still present in real life have been dispelled by research first from the longitudinal Berlin Aging Study. According to the research, older adults are not preoccupied with grief and are able and eager to learn new ideas. They have a strong sense that they can and need to be in charge of their lives and achieve their objectives.
Reference
Hutchison, E. (2022). Dimensions of human behavior the changing life course (6th ed.). Sage Publications, Inc.