Critical Reflective Account of Caring for Ageing Parents in the Fourth Age

Overview: This paper will analyse critical reflective biographical accounts from social work educators re-examining seven cultural myths, which may encourage ageism. Families sometimes find he process for accessing social/health care poorly signposted and hard to navigate and our experiences in relation to this will be discussed.Proposal text: Background/Rationale
This presentation will revisit a paper (x, 2004) and from an autoethnographic/critical reflective biographical approach will re-examine seven cultural notions or myths, which may encourage ageism (Dixon and Gregory, 1987; Sidell, 1995). It is framed within our experiential knowledge of caring for our ageing parents, with the tensions and challenges around problematising the value of expertise based on human rights, experience, communication, grief, and autonomy and freedom versus safety. The presentation will emphasise that by analysing the impact of our personal life experiences (Smith, 2012) we can start to understand both the intended and unintended consequences of policy and practice affecting those in the fourth age. As social work educators, we want to reflect upon how our tacit experiential knowledge, if made explicit, can impact upon our own and others’ learning. The recent death of our parents has allowed for a period of reflection on our own caring and indeed professional social work experiences, knowledge, skills and practice. It is argued that the ageing process is unequal as class and socio-economic factors, i.e., geography, age, gender, religion and ethnicity, all play parts in determining how someone ages, and indeed upon the care an individual older person receives (Chiu et al., 2001). A fuller understanding of negotiating the role of one stakeholder, that of family carers in the ageing process, is elicited in this paper.
Methods/Methodology
An analysis of our own personal journeys of caring for our ageing parents is explored to make our tacit experiential knowledge explicit and so enrich, validate and authenticate a fuller understanding of the ageing process in relation to human rights. This paper draws on autoethnography as a form of qualitative research in which we used critical self-reflection to explore our anecdotal and personal experiences of caring for our parents and connected our autobiographical stories to wider cultural, political and social meanings and understandings of ageing. Adams et al. (2015) argue reflexivity includes both acknowledging and critiquing our place and privilege in society, and using the stories we tell to break long-held silences on power, relationships, cultural taboos, and forgotten and/or suppressed experiences.
Results
Although the context of this paper is UK-based, many of the themes identified have relevance internationally. Ageing is a global phenomenon, though its trajectory and the response to it is not. By using critical reflection, the power relations, interactions and the decisions made between ourselves, our brothers and our parents are explored (Hakaka and Holmes, 2017) and critiqued.
Conclusions
Overall, there is a necessity to identify, critique and challenge ill-informed and oppressive language, labels and discourses used to describe people in the fourth age and to explain ageing issues. Social work educators and, indeed, all professionals need to reflect on and challenge the myths of ageing and avoid ‘knee-jerk’ reactions.