Abstract
The Women in Gerontology Legacy (WIGL) Project involved interviewing 46 older women gerontologists between 2014 and 2015. The current study focuses on the WIGL interview questions regarding the interactions between participants’ experiences as gerontologists and their own aging. Emergent themes focus on the direction of influence: professional lives influencing personal lives, personal lives informing professional lives and mutuality between personal and professional lives. Thematic findings expand our current understanding of how professional knowledge and experiences contribute to personal aging experiences and the role personal aging experiences can have on the professional lives of women gerontologists. There is a potential for disconnect to occur between our personal experiences and the experiences of others. The current study contributes to our understanding of when and how this occurs, so we can then ensure our messages fall on receptive ears by overcoming the natural tendency to distort or ignore messages that may create anxiety.
Keywords
Women Gerontologists Personal Experiences with Aging: Results from the Women in Gerontology Legacy Project
In an editorial, O’Neill (2016) pointed out that it is surprising how little research exists that explores how geriatricians, (i.e., medical doctors with expertise in aging) personally view their own aging and aging in general. The current study seeks to address this issue with regard to gerontologists, specifically women gerontologists. Gerontologists are professionals from multiple disciplines focusing on aging. Understanding people’s attitudes toward aging, including attitudes toward their own aging, provides us with a better conception of what impacts the aging process and subsequently how to positively impact the aging process. We should investigate and understand how gerontologists view aging as both a general and a personal experience. This will result in more informed professionals who are better able to fight against ageist stereotypes in both their professional and personal lives. O’Neill makes the point that “geriatricians may unknowingly tolerate or amplify ageism” (p. 440) when they fail to note its existence in themselves and in their professional field.
We expected to find a distinction between those professional and personal lives, as we often protect ourselves by assuming bad things will not happen to us. The tendency to display this mindset is posited by the theory known as the Just-World Hypothesis. The Just-World Hypothesis (i.e., the just-world fallacy) was established and scientifically supported by Lerner (1980). The concept describes our inclination to believe that the world is fair, and that justice will prevail (ancient philosophers noted this tendency long before Lerner’s empirical work). This belief leads us to think that good things happen to good people and bad things will happen to bad people. This natural tendency is reinforced as it protects us from worrying about something bad happening to us as we also tend to view ourselves as generally good people. This mindset makes sense as it gives us the ability to go about our lives without being in constant fear of bad things, we have heard of happening to other people, happening to us (Lerner, 1980). The Just-World Hypothesis is an explanation for why we separate our experience and the experiences of others. Specifically, within the realm of gerontology, we might be knowledgeable about aging-related conditions and yet expect to not personally experience those conditions or to see them in our loved ones. This tendency protects us from the fear, anxiety, and other negative consequences of the awareness of our own frailty and the frailty of our loved ones.
The Women in Gerontology Legacy (WIGL) project adds to the existing canon of literature by providing a comprehensive and thematic examination across the lives of several older women gerontologists. WIGL involved interviewing 46 older adult women gerontologists regarding a variety of topics. We decided to focus our study exclusively on women because the roles of women in the field of gerontology changed over time. The women we interviewed held high level positions in the field that were quite rare at the start of their careers. While outside the scope of this article, the overall WIGL project seeks to document the changing roles of women in the field. One part of the WIGL project examined their personal experiences with aging. The current study reports those thematic findings; thus, expanding our current understanding of the role personal aging experiences can have on the professional lives of women gerontologists and how professional knowledge and experiences contribute to personal aging experiences.
Materials and Methods
Data were collected for the WIGL Project between 2014 and 2015. The goal of the WIGL project is to document and disseminate the contributions of women to the field of gerontology. The interviewees included 46 women working in the field of gerontology in various capacities including 28 from academia, 15 from non-profit and policy organizations and three from private consultancies. All participants worked in the field of gerontology for over 20 years with some having over 40 years in the field. Four of the participants were women of color. The participants were from many different backgrounds and career paths. Some of them did not identify as a gerontologist but as people who work in the field of aging. As an interdisciplinary science, people working in the field of gerontology often come from a variety of disciplines with a variety of educational degrees, and may or may not choose to identify as a gerontologist. For example, they may be a psychologist, sociologist or anthropologist who focus on aging issues.
The participants were recruited through a variety of strategies including contacting all women Gerontological Society of America’s fellows who were major presenters at the Gerontological Society of America’s 2014 Annual Meeting, the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education’s 2015 Annual Meeting, the 2015 Aging in America Conference, and the 2015 Southern Gerontological Society’s Annual Meeting, and also suggestions for potential participants from other gerontologists. Primary outreach was done through email and face-to-face requests by members of the WIGL team. All participants were either self-identified or identified by others an older woman who had worked in the field of gerontology for at least 20 years.
Graduate students (21 total) interviewed the participants and subsequently transcribed the interviews. A member of the WIGL team was present for all interviews and took detailed notes. The WIGL research team consisted of four researchers, two professors, and two graduate students. A single in-person interview included questions exploring interviewees’ career trajectories, identities as gerontologists, experiences with women mentors, the unique nature of being a woman in the field of gerontology, and how being a gerontologist interacted with their own personal aging process. It is the last of these questions that is the focus of the current study.
The interviews, lasted between 20 minutes and an hour and a half, and were both audio and video taped. The audio tapes were transcribed verbatim by the graduate students. They were then reviewed by the WIGL research team to ensure accuracy. The 46 transcriptions comprise the full data set that was analyzed by the research team. An a priori codebook was created which included both organizational and thematic codes (Crabtree & Miller, 1999). The organizational codes included codes for each interview question and location of the interview. Thematic codes were created based on notes taken by the research team during their observations of the interviews. Additional codes were added during the analysis through discussion between members of the research team. In all, over 70 codes were created. These codes and the interview transcripts were loaded into NVivo for coding by members of the research team (QSR International, 2012).
To allow for comparison and discussion, pairs of researchers were responsible for the initial coding of each interview. Later all members of the research team reviewed the coded material from each interview. An online journal, which could be accessed by all members of the research team, was utilized for coding notes. Discussion of thematic development took place through conference calls every other week during the analysis phase of the project. The codes for the question, “How has being a gerontologist interacted with your own personal aging process?” included the following major codes: emotion, preparation, retirement, time of life, personal experiences, and professional experiences. These major codes led to the emergence of themes which centered on three areas: professional lives influencing personal lives, mutual influence between professional and personal lives, and personal lives influencing professional lives. Themes centered around these three areas are presented in the results section. Since part of the project was to present video recording of the interviewees in a public format, interviewees signed a consent form waiving their rights to anonymity in the study. Results presented below therefore include the names of the interviewees. We received IRB approval for the current research.
Results
Overview
A substantial number of the participants (20 of 46) described how their professional experiences influenced their personal aging. Some of the participants (16 of 46) described ways their personal lives influenced their professional lives. Some (5 of 46) participants described a mutuality where there was a back-and-forth of influence between their personal and professional lives. Each of these themes is presented below along with quotes from participants exemplifying the theme.
Professional Lives Influencing Personal Lives
The first theme serves as an example of the famous saying: “The cobbler’s child is the last one to have shoes.” As Nina Silverstein stated we are “experts on aging, but not experts in aging.” Though gerontologists know logical facts about older adulthood and the aging process, that does not necessarily mean that knowledge is smoothly or easily applied in the real-world lives of themselves or those they care for.
We saw this dissonance experienced by the participants. They could not reconcile their professional knowledge of aging with their personal experience with aging. Within this theme women focused on their own personal aging experiences and their experiences as caregivers.
Janet Frank’s experience with aging was particularly interesting because even with her training in geriatrics and gerontology she was still shocked by her own biological aging. This surprise was not so much because she did not know that she was aging, but because her aging had manifested itself in the form of a serious illness much earlier than she had anticipated. She stated: I had kind of a weird experience in 2005 when I contracted a very rare autoimmune disease and at one point I was carrying around one of those giant oxygen tanks. My oxygen capacity/ lung capacity, was at 38%...And I thought, “Wow, this isn’t how I thought it was going to happen!” I was about, just under 55, and it kind of took me by surprise. And I thought, hmm, I guess this must be what aging people experience. You know, they get surprised with what lands in their lap…It was this autoimmune, often treatable illness and I was one of the blessed people that recovered fully and I’m in remission.
Lisa Gwyther stated, “I know a lot about grief and bereavement, I know a lot about parental loss, I know a lot about spousal loss and widowhood, and um, nothing prepared me for my own aging.” In many cases although the participants talked about their training and the way that it was helpful in aiding others through their aging process, they still recalled feelings of surprise with some aspects of their own aging. Dena Shenk stated, “As gerontologists, we know quite a lot about aging. But you know what, it is really a surprise (laughing) when you start experiencing it yourself.” Colette Brown’s response about the interaction between personal aging and her knowledge of gerontology was, “Sometimes I’m among my friends who are also gerontologists we chuckle about this because we say, well we thought we always knew things about aging, we just never thought it would happen to us.”
Peggy Perkinson discussed the way that her training helped her understand the importance of planning. She recalls a conversation between herself and a college roommate when she was younger. She said: And I can still remember this conversation I had with my roommate in San Francisco… her background… was in home economics and…she was living day to day and a lot of people do that but I just had different goals that, maybe being in human development, made me think more carefully about, oh these are the stages that I will be going through and there will be this time of work, there will be this time of maybe retirement plus work.
Betsy Sprouse’s professional training left her informed but not necessarily prepared for her own aging. She stated: I think that helps if you realize that arthritis is a condition that affects anybody who lives long enough. Or that sooner or later you have to be that adult who faces the death of their parents and figures out how to manage that process. So at least you know you’re not alone when you’re going through some of these changes.
Oftentimes the women found that everything that is applicable theoretically is not always the same in practice. Several of the participants experienced dissonance when attempting to reconcile what they knew professionally with what they were experiencing personally. It seems that the process of aging is a lived learning experience, even for those well versed in the language of growing old.
Many of the interviewees had some experiences with caregiving. Their experience with gerontology made them better equipped as caregivers; however, it did not make the experience of caregiving easier. For example, Linda Harootyan said the following about caregiving: I think when we dealt with um caregiving issues, in particular with my mother-in-law, I think because my husband and I were both in the field, that it was helpful, but I think it was also eye-opening that some of the issues that in theory um look one way, in reality it’s not as easy.
Even though both she and her husband were trained as gerontologists and they benefited from this training, there were still things about their personal caregiving experiences they found surprising and unprepared for.
Charlotte Nusberg’s response was also reflective of this sentiment. She said, “I managed my mother’s long-term care until her death…While having intellectual knowledge about the challenges my mother faced, I was not emotionally prepared for them.”
Carole Cox summed up the dissonance between her professional and personal lives relative to caregiving in this way: You know things theoretically and it doesn’t mean anything when it’s in real life. For instance, when my father died and I’ve been doing all this work on caregiving and then he was in California and I was in New York and he had a very long, six month, pretty bad illness with heart disease. What I knew theoretically did not necessarily help me as a caregiver.
Phyllis Greenberg stated, “…And what you do learn, it’s a lot easier to be a professional interacting with other people’s families than to be a professional interacting with your own family because you have that emotional investment.” Here Dr Greenberg identifies one key factor, the emotional connections with others, as a difference between the professional and personal experiences of caregiving.
Although these women were highly knowledgeable about the process of aging and very well versed in the characteristics of successful aging, their own aging process and those of their loved ones were surprising. Their responses show that aging is a dynamic rather than static process, and reading, teaching, and writing about it does not always prepare you to experience it.
Personal Lives Informing Professional Lives
The second theme was exemplified when Phyllis Greenberg said, “Eventually you become your own case study.” The emergence of this theme demonstrates how gerontologists bring their own life course into their work. Our personal lives are often the source of our professional interests, goals, and inspirations.
This is reflected in the quotes for directionality where women’s personal lives informed their professional lives. From a life course perspective, women discussed their journeys in and through their gerontology careers as being influenced by their personal lives. Several women discussed how their initial interest in gerontology came from their experiences with the aging of others. For example, Lynn Hodgson stated, “Scratch a gerontologist and you’re probably going to find somebody who had a relationship with grandparents, or an older person.” Several of the women we interviewed discussed how they were inspired into the field by their experiences with older adults when they were younger.
Katherine Jay Elliot discussed it this way
Having an excellent model in the grandfather that I grew up with, who was very healthy and active until he was quite old…maybe that just predisposes, made me, I wasn’t afraid to go into gerontology because I had a different view of what aging could be from my grandfather.
In this way several women in our study observed aging in a positive way when they were younger, and this early inspiration brought them into the field.
Once in the field, the journey through their profession was informed by their own aging. For some, early on in their careers, they were seen as too young. Sandra Timmermann stated it this way:
It used to be when I was your age that people would say, “What is a young person like you doing in the field of gerontology?” (laughing) And I was always offended by that because I thought it has nothing to do with your age. And now no one ever says that, they’re almost like, “Oh, you’re in gerontology, well that makes sense. You’re older.” And that doesn’t make any sense either, you know, because you need to rise above the personal experience to get people to see the whole picture.
Yet for others, there were advantages to being younger. Lisa Gwyther expressed it this way:
When I started out in gerontology and I was working with older people I, um, I thought it was a terrific advantage because they were thrilled that a young person was so violently interested in what they thought, and when we did research and we interviewed, or did clinical interventions, to assist older people, they were really pleased with the attention and interest of academics who were younger and that thought this was an important area of study. Um, there’s less of that when you’re a peer of the people you are studying (laughing).
The participants in the current study were all older and most had grown older while working in the field. Unlike other fields, for gerontologists growing older in one’s personal life means that they experienced what they were studying. The contribution of that aging experience often informed and improved their work. Kathryn Mc Grew discussed how her aging experience contributed to her skills as a researcher: Relating to some of the subject matter is not a requirement of being a good interviewer at all. It’s just a lens that I take to that experience. And I do think that I’ve gotten better and better with age. And as I come to understand all these experiences…through my own aging lens. So, I do think I am somewhat of a better interviewer and sometimes people connect with me in a way that they might not if I were a younger researcher.
As these women grew older some were able to reflect on a shift in prioritization that took place through their careers. Colette Brown summarized the life course perspective of an older gerontologist this way: One of the best things about getting older is things don’t bother you…So, you choose things more um, you’re more judicious, I think, with your time and where you want to commit yourself to. So, I think it’s actually, I’m happier than I think I was in my 30s or 40s where I felt that every battle I had to take on and um, which is exhausting when you do that. So, I’m actually really enjoying where I am right now.
She exemplifies the integration of life lessons learned; this idea that over the life course there is a reprioritization that takes place. This was also the case with Janet Frank who developed an autoimmune disease late in her career. She stated: Life experience has really shaped the fact that, you know, I have different priorities now and a big part of that is taking care of myself. Cause I have to…stay on top of my health and fitness. So that’s a big part of my life. And that reordered a lot of my work because whatever I needed was always last on the list. It was always what the job needed, what others needed and then if there was anything left over, I took care of me. That’s flipped.
Some women in the study reflected on role transitions which took place in later life and how these transitions influenced their professional lives. Lynn Hodgson told us the story of how she found out she was going to become a grandmother. She stated: And I told you that one of the, the areas of research that I have followed for 30 years and written about for 30 years is grandparenting. And I just became a grandparent! So, why wouldn’t I! In fact, can I tell ya a funny story? OK. So. Everybody has a story about when their child tells them they are going to become a grandparent. Right? So, my son and my daughter-in-law came to visit us. We all met in New York City. They handed me, they handed my husband and I, a present. We opened it up, and it was a book that said, “Baby Boomer Grandparents,” or something like that. And I said, “That’s wonderful! You’re helping me with my research!” I thought, “They’ve found a book for my research.” And they looked at me, and my husband tapped me on the head, and he said, “This is for both of us, do ya think they might be trying to tell us something?” And I sort of went, “Oh, I got it! Oh my God, I’m going to become a grandmother!”
The other major life transition that women spoke about was retirement. Some of the women were preparing to transition into retirement and others had retired. Even in retirement they were able to reflect on the contributions of this transition to their professional lives. Dena Shenk stated:
And I have been doing my observations as I tell people about my retirement and I watched their reactions. I sit every evening and I keep saying that I have to write notes because I am seeing the patterns and the themes. And I am fascinated! But the fact that even gerontologists very often get a look, “Ah! What will you do?” Seriously?
In this way Dena Shenk uses her own retirement process as an opportunity for participant observation. The reactions of her colleagues have been surprising to her. She assumed that gerontologists would have some understanding of life after retirement.
Finally, Laura Bauer discussed life in retirement in this way: I am seriously contemplating going back to school because I … you know people live a long time in my family and so I may still have another 20 or so years that I could really be doing something positive and get some more education and training so that I can do an even better job. So, it’s definitely, I don’t think I’m too old.
Mutuality between Professional and Personal Lives
The final theme was exemplified by Lynn Hodgson when she spoke about a melding of her work and personal life and by Joanne Damon Rodriguez when she discussed a single path through life. Gerontologists often see gerontological concepts at work in their personal lives and in the lives of those they are close to and this leads to a back-and-forth confluence of understanding regarding the aging experience.
Lynn Hodgson expressed this mutuality by comparing the field of gerontology with other fields: So, the point is, my work life and my home life, um, have melded very, very nicely. It’s been a great, it’s a great discipline…I often wonder…what mathematicians, chemists, I mean, what do they do when they go home? Do they have any application of this in their home lives? And it sounds probably very parochial of me in that I don’t know enough about math, and I don’t know enough about chemistry, and I’m sure they do. But, I sit here and think, me, I, I live what I teach.
This melding of the personal and professional was also expressed by Joanne Damon Rodriguez. She stated, “I always thought that it was important not to distance oneself from one’s subject matter…It isn’t a dichotomous transition from one world to another, it’s kind of a path.” In this way she sees a mutuality where each informs the other and there is a lack of separation.
While that lack of separation can be helpful, it also has its challenges. Katherine McGrew discussed the challenges of the mutuality in this way: While I was studying caregiving, doing a lot of… evaluation research but also a lot of basic research about the caregiving experience… I was caring for my mom who had Alzheimer’s disease…and my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease so here I was doing all of these interviews and then having this experience myself.
Discussion
Three themes emerged in participants’ responses to the question about how their work related to their own experience of aging. In our exploration of Professional Lives Influencing Personal Lives, Personal Lives Informing Professional Lives, and Mutuality between Professional and Personal Lives, we noted important considerations that will allow us to better understand how to apply gerontological research findings in the real world.
For Professional Lives Influencing Personal Lives, we can note that our experts have literally written the books on aging, but they were still learning how to be experts in their own aging. This finding is a vital consideration as we work to apply gerontological knowledge in real life. We should incorporate flexibility into our approaches in order to account for how each individual’s experiences are unique, and we should consider how logical knowledge on a topic does not necessarily correlate with emotional reactions when it occurs in real life.
For Mutuality between Professional and Personal Lives, we can note that there are struggles with finding respite from your topic when it is a part of both your personal and professional realms. This finding is important as we can learn useful information about how to bridge the gap between gerontological knowledge and how it is experienced in real-world settings.
For Personal Lives Informing Professional Lives, we can note that the impact that personal aging has on the careers of these women continues through the life course. Here, even in retirement, personal life informs career. It allows for a reprioritization and a continued journey. This is an important finding as we should consider our own experiences as a source of topics for future research and inquiry that will help us to further understand the many facets of older adulthood and the aging process.
Overall, an interesting finding in the current study was that many participants expressed experiencing a disconnect between their professional knowledge about aging and aging issues, and their own personal experiences with aging. For instance, this sentiment was expressed when Lisa Gwyther said, “Nothing prepared me for my own aging” and when Colette Brown said, “We [gerontologists] always knew things about aging, we just never thought it would happen to us.” Professional gerontologists learned about the experiences of others, lectured about gerontology and aging-related issues that have happened to others, and often have seen the aging-related experiences of others, yet this knowledge may not impact their perceptions of themselves or their loved ones. We may see others struggle with specific aging-related issues in later life, yet we do not connect that to our own assumptions or expectations for our future or the future of our loved ones. We may learn, investigate, and lecture about aging-related issues while not thinking about how we could apply or consider all of that knowledge in our own lives.
When confronted with this lack of connection we may express surprise, as many of the participants did. The subsequent section will discuss potential explanations for how that disconnect may occur, though it is important to note that this is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Some participants noted that their gerontological expertise did help them in their dealings with the aging of loved ones. For instance, Linda Harootyan, when discussing caring for her mother-in-law, stated, “I think because my husband and I were both in the field, that it was helpful.” The participants were more likely to mention this type of benefit in reference to others compared to in reference to their own personal aging.
That disconnect between professional knowledge and personal lives met our expectation as predicted by the Just-World Hypothesis. We should work to help people apply gerontological concepts in their lives in a way that gets them past this barrier. We should consider first overcoming the anxiety and negative emotions that may be evoked by thinking about the potential negative aspects of aging, in order to then help others (and ourselves) prepare for those potential experiences. The Just-World Hypothesis reveals our tendency to assume our experiences will be different from the experiences of others. Perhaps Dena Shenk’s statement best sums up the realization that we fall prey to this inclination, “As gerontologists, we know quite a lot about aging. But you know what, it is really a surprise (laughing) when you start experiencing it yourself.” It is important to note that we have much to look forward to as we navigate the aging process, and we can learn about positive aspects of aging and older adulthood from the experiences of others. That being said, we also should consider the struggles and potential negative aspects of aging, and be receptive to applying gerontological knowledge to ourselves and others in order to address and prepare for those issues as well.
There are other examples of how we view ourselves differently from how we view others and how knowledge we possess may not necessarily be applied to our own personal lives. For example, Weiss and Lang (2012) investigated participants dissociating themselves from others as a “self-protective strategy” (p. 153). These researchers assessed a sample of older adults ranging in age from 65 to 85. Understanding their study requires noting the distinction between chronological age (how many years old a person is) and subjective age (how old a person says they feel). It is common for children, teenagers, and young adults to report feeling older than their chronological age and for older adults to report feeling younger than their chronological age (Zupancic et al., 2011). Weiss and Lang (2012) found that participants who were randomly assigned to a condition where they were asked to answer questions about negative aspects of aging (as compared to positive aspects of aging and a neutral control group) displayed more of a discrepancy between their chronological age and their subjective age. They also found those in the negative condition reported that they felt they identified less with their chronological age group. Though our professional knowledge and research, gerontologists are more likely to see both positives and negatives associated with the aging process. Weiss and Lang’s (2012) findings show that, when exposed to negative information about aging, individuals will subsequently distance “themselves from their age group, as well as their actual chronological age” (p. 159). This dissociation from chronological age and one’s own age group may have contributed to why the participants in the current study experienced the disconnect with their knowledge of aging and their own personal aging.
As gerontologists we know the aging process is complex and individualistic, with high variability. Even with our knowledge concerning gerontology, we can still experience a disconnect between what we know and what we personally experience. This sentiment was expressed when Charlotte Nusberg said, “while having intellectual knowledge about the challenges my mother faced, I was not emotionally prepared for them,” and when Carole Cox said “What I knew theoretically did not necessarily help me as a caregiver.”
The good news is that we often have the ability to overcome our initial inclinations. We are not fated to always fall prey to ageist stereotypes or the Just-World Fallacy. Though these are human tendencies that may occur automatically, we can catch ourselves making those assumptions. Simply being aware of these tendencies can help us to notice and subsequently resist them.
The application of gerontological research findings often requires overcoming our tendency to seek to protect ourselves from the negative emotions associated with the potential ailments associated with aging. In order to encourage successful aging through the application of gerontological research, we encourage professionals to first ensure our messages fall on receptive ears by overcoming our natural tendency to distort or ignore messages when they create anxiety. Future researchers should explore how to apply the current findings in terms of investigating how to best communicate gerontological knowledge to a variety of populations. The first step in effective communication may be to address and overcome our tendency to experience anxiety as a result of hearing this type of information.
We can also take action through measures such as gerontologist hosted discussion groups that focus on sharing knowledge about our tendencies to disregard information that may cause anxiety and how we manage our anxieties. Subsequently, we should encourage the application of gerontological findings that will then be more likely to fall on receptive ears. This action point will provide needed support that would both educate and encourage a “hope for the best, plan for the worst” approach. Another important aspect of taking action to address this issue would be to ensure these findings are applied when physicians specializing in gerontology are trained. If education and training for medical healthcare professionals includes helping them understand how to more effectively communicate with and motivate their patients, then they will be better prepared to encourage their patients to overcome barriers such as those we would predict based on the Just-World Hypothesis and other self-protective strategies. Educators should also apply these findings. Educators often encourage their students to consider how the course material is relevant to them and/or to people they know. The current findings may be especially helpful when covering aging-related information. Educators should also first address the potential anxiety that may occur, so their students can then be more receptive to learning about gerontological content.
The findings from the current study make us better prepared for our own aging, the aging of our loved ones, and all those we have the power to impact. As O’Neill (2016) noted, “there is a need for reflective engagement with our own ageing” (p. 440). This reflection will not only help us to be more prepared for our and our loved one’s aging, it will also make us better gerontologists as we more richly consider the experience of aging. Considering personal attitudes toward older adults, aging, and your own aging is an important part of professional development for gerontologists.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is supported by Gerontological Society of America (Mentoring Effect Grant).
