Question

What is the difference in attitudes about death between younger and older adults?

Answer 1

Mark Twain's felt that as per his saying goes "It can't really happen to me". However this death is inevitable. The attitudes regarding death generates from the childhood when the child starts differentiating between the right thing or the thing which can hurt him/her.

The young age is energetic phase of life where the individual makes his/her identity in the society, it manufactures the individual mental processes to become physically mature as well. The generational differences the individual watches or learns from the society, family or culture he/she associates with. As this phase is reflective thinking, the attitude regarding death is not coming to the mind as Twain said. Young individual starts thinking abstractly and works on knowing about his/her future, death comes last. As many research quotes, the young people hesitate in talking about the death. In the research paper of 'Attitudes towards Death in a Group of Adolescents and Young Adults in the City of Bucaramanga', there exists weak correlations between attitudes towards death and age (r<-0.132) in the youthful age. However when someone close to him/her decease, the curiosity emerges with respect to what after death?.

On other side the older adults knows about the death. They try to make their life secure for their family feeling what after their own demise. The correlations between attitudes towards death and its inevitability increases by this period of life due to following reasons:-

1. Experience and knowhow about the life.

2. Personal bereavement of closed ones.

3. Retirement transition to the health deterioration.

4. Generativity to pass on the torch to young population (as explained by Erickson)

However this acceptance of death is likely to come easier if the individual reflects his/her life in a positive manner. On otherside there could be denial, rage and anger or bargaining (as per Kubler & Ross)