Nice piece by John Leland in the NYT today on how old people -- senior citizens if you prefer -- detest being talked to as if they're children:
Dr. Rosebrook said that even in her facility, "we have 300 elders who are 'sweetie'd' here. Our kids talk to elders with more respect than some of our professional care providers."
She said she considered elderspeak a form of bullying. "It's talking down to them," she said. "We do it to children so well. And it's natural for the sandwich generation, since they address children that way."
To this I give a mighty harrumph. When my father had Parkinson's disease in the final years of his life, I was appalled at how these care-givers spoke to him as if he were about a seven-year-old child. Here was a man who had been a distinguished trial attorney, who read about a book a week on subjects ranging from history to science to the flow of global capital and The New Yorker and The Economist and so forth nearly every week of his adult life. And care givers, asking him what kind of shirt he wanted to wear that day, talked literally as a mother would talk to a little child.
They meant well. They loved him. But this was a problem, and clearly still is. Something must be done!
