Transmission of Silverist Culture

Where I live, San Francisco, I see a lot of older parents with young kids. I don't know this for a scientific fact, but it appears that people are waiting longer to have kids. My wife and I had our baby girl, Rowan, at 36. So you get 35-45 year olds with young children. As this becomes more wide spread (if it does... and my guess is it will) you get a skewing of cultural transmission toward an older norms. My parents were quite young when I was born. My mother was 21. My parents both admit "we were kids raising kids".

What does this mean? Well, to the extent that parent's ideals, temparaments, desires, etc are absorbed by the growing child, the child of older parents will carry those "more mature" traits into adulthood themselves. And if enough kids are raised this way... over time this can help skew the overall culture toward set of (dare I say) more mature norms. Overall could this lead to a mature culture? More evolved thinking? More peaceful? More graceful way of living. All the good things that come from the influence of older wiser humans? We can hope. (Please also see the entry on Wisdom Accretion)


Here is a snippet from an article on older parents:

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There are definite advantages to being mid-life parents.

1. Older men tend to be more involved fathers. "Men's attitudes about what it means to be a father have dramatically shifted," explained William S. Pollack, Ph.D., Co-director of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital, Belmont, Mass., and assistant psychiatry professor at Harvard. Many middle-aged men choosing fatherhood today are well-established baby boomers. Fatherhood in the 1950s usually meant a distant male who went to work, supported the family, but left the child rearing to mom. Men of this era may not remember having much affection or physical contact from their dads. Today's dads are part of the team and are more committed to fatherhood.
   
2. Parents are more established in their careers. If career issues are ironed out, children are less of a threat. Parents feel like they have time for both their career and a family. Parents are also more financially stable. They probably own property or a house. This is one less financial burden. This also means that they can probably better afford quality child care.
   
3. Older parents say they are more patient, calm, and better able to go with the flow than they were when they were younger. The farther away from childhood that you are, the easier it is to understand it. Many parents feel that if they had become parents in their 20s, they were still too much a child themselves to be a good parent. They've reached a new level of maturity. They don't worry so much about their children's position on the developmental scale. They realize now children don't have to be perfect. They don't need children to fulfill their ambitions and prove they are good people. The children are freer just to be individuals and grow up in loving, supportive atmospheres.
   
4. Older parents have more time to spend with their children. They realize what a precious gift they have been given and want to make the most of it.

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Brain Gets More Rational with Age

Brain Gets More Rational with Age
Memory finding links mental maturation to better behavior

Being Older and Wiser leads to Evolutionary Success

Here is an article talking about how the fact of iincreased longevity lead to evolutionary success for humans.

Article here: We May Owe it All to Longevity

Dental records provide evidence that modern humans thrived because they were "older and wiser"
By Gabe Romain
Betterhumans Staff
7/5/2004 4:51 PM

Quotes:

"A dramatic increase in longevity that took place during the early Upper Paleolithic Period, around 30,000 BC, could explain humanity's evolutionary success."

"Old age would have also promoted population growth and strengthened social relationships and kinship bonds.

The presence of grandmothers, for example, confers an important evolutionary advantage as they transfer knowledge and other resources to their daughters and their daughters' offspring. "

"The number of people living to older adulthood would have allowed early modern humans to pass down specialized knowledge from one generation to another."

Symposium: Creating very old people

Creating very old people: Individual blessing or societal disaster

"That is the title of a symposium to be held at the Marriott Glenpointe Hotel in Teaneck, New Jersey on April 30, 2004. It is an extremely important issue. We now are moving to the capacity to increase life expectancy at birth from the current 77 years to 90 to 95 years. That will happen relatively quickly. That is just the beginning. Many scientists now consider aging as a disease and they are now working very hard to understand the aging process and then literally change the boundaries of aging allowing people to have life expectancies on average of 110 to 120 or more years. Some highly regarded experts now say that, once we learn how to change the boundaries of aging, there is actually no upper limit."

People age 100 or older - will grow to 400,000 by 2030, a 500 percent increase.

"There are now about 36 million Americans over age 65, a population expected to double by 2030.

There's some qualified good news: The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the number of centenarians - people age 100 or older - will grow to 400,000 by 2030, a 500 percent increase. Granted, they won't all be in great shape. "


See article

Wisdom Accretion

It is true that we often do not listen to the wisdom of others. Most often we need to learn from our own mistakes rather than avoid those mistakes all together by listening to our elders. As the world goes this means that the collective wisdom-in-action, not the wisdom that actually resides in the heads of the older generation, is always at a lower level than it could be if we indeed listened and took to heart the wisdom of those who have gone before. One could make the argument then that we are not really building up the collective reservoir of wisdom. That the body of wisdom is not evolving so fast. The reason is that the older generation die off and with them goes there wisdom. And a fresh generation starts, ignoring the old stuff. What if either the old folks didn't die out so soon or the young folks really listened to the old ones? Would our wisdom pool grow? Advance? What would that wiser world be like?

The Future of Aging in a Biotech Era

Ageless Bodies and Happy Souls: The Future of Aging in a Biotech Era

An Interview with Leon Kass, MD,
Chairman, President's Council on Bioethics

Popular culture: Where are the old people?

Still the predominating image in mass media with regard to selling products is young people. But are we selling to young people? Who has the money? Is it really the 20-somethings. Perhaps, depending on the product. But much of the money is in the hands of older people who are getting older by the day. At what point will we look at tv ads and see primarily older people being protrayed. And I don't mean people with gray hair. Because, again, modern cosmetic procedures let us look anyway we want. I mean people acting older, thinking older, questing after more stable pursuits. What do older people want anyway. I guess we want new cars just like everybody else. But will we want to see a commercial about some yahoo ripping it up on the twisty roads of highway 1. Does that appeal to us? What would a good car commerical look like for a 70 year old?

I'm old on the inside

Silverism takes issue with the statement that I may look old, but I'm young on the inside. No. You can look anyway you want on the outside but the point is that you are old on the inside and that is a good thing. Being older you have a different perspective on things. More balanced perhaps. More stable. More of a lot of things. Being old is good. I'm finally old on the inside. Thank god.