Caring and affection for the elderly can never be enough.
You’re driving me crazy! I can’t stand you anymore! I’m going to put you in a nursing home! You’re not old enough for that! You’ve lived your life, old man, let me live mine!
We can never have enough care and affection for the elderly!
Let’s think before talking like that to an elderly person, even more if it is our grandfather or grandmother, let’s think that they are people, that they are our family, but mainly let’s think about the love they gave us and what they did for us one day, let’s be grateful to the elderly.
In 2011 the United Nations recognized the abuse of the elderly as a social problem, declaring June 15th as World Elder Abuse Awareness Day.
This initiative was an invitation to Member States, organizations of the United Nations system and other international and regional institutions, as well as civil society, to pay due attention to this problem.
Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over the age of 60 will double from 11 percent to 22 percent. This age group will grow from 605 000 000 000 to 2000 000 000 over the course of half a century. It is important to make the world aware of the need to care for this growing adult population.
Elder abuse has been defined as «a single or repeated act that causes harm or suffering to an older person, or the lack of appropriate measures to prevent it, that occurs in a relationship based on trust».
Let’s think about how physically and psychologically affects our elders the mistreatment, they are in an advanced age where perhaps, everything hurts a little more, let’s think that we are harming those who do not have in most of the cases how to defend themselves.
Many times we commit a negative action against an elderly person without even imagining it, just indifference is mistreatment, to see them as incapable of making important decisions in the home is mistreatment, to shout at them with obscene words because they do not hear as before is mistreatment, to laugh at them because they cannot walk firm and straight is mistreatment.
Let us contribute to their pleasant passage through this stage of life, someday it will be our turn to be in their place and we will see how much they suffered when they do to us what we did to them.
To mistreat a grandparent is to be ungrateful with the family, with life, they are teaching, experience, before putting them in mute mode as if they were a TV, we should learn from their advice, nothing better than listening to those who have already lived more than 60 years and went through what we are going through now.
Old age is not an impediment, it is just a stage and a way of life, which is not easy to face but not impossible either, and much more if everyone who reaches it receives the support of the younger ones. The care and affection we give to our elders will never be enough, the old people are bled!
Written by Alejandro López Quintero.
