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Zach Santarelli
Mr. Sabot
English II
9 December 2015
Treatment of Elderly in Different Cultures
Isolated, alone, and ignored; These are the traits that many elderly people in the United
States hold. They are put in retirement and nursing homes by their children, where they are often
ignored. Mexico is exactly the opposite. Elderly often live in the same home as their children,
where they cook, clean, and help raise children. In China, it is considered incredibly rude to
ignore your aging patients and legislation has been passed to mandate visitation. There are many
cultural factors that contribute to these practices and ideas, but the United States is especially
interesting.
The United States treats the elderly in a manner that isolates them from society, but why?
It is typical for young adults in the US to send their aging parents to nursing or retirement homes
when they cannot care for them anymore. They are, typically, not visited often while they are in
these homes and this leads to isolation and loneliness. Anthropologist Jared Diamond, from
UCLA, says that this is due to the United States having a Protestant work ethic. This means
many Americans believe that if you are not working you have little value to society. Because of
this, many young Americans feel that old people are useless and a drain on society. Also, young
adults in the United States do not want to see their parents getting old and some of them cope
with this by not seeing them in person. According to Jared Diamond, modern technologies have
taken away much of the usefulness that the elderly used to have. Before, older people were a
wealth of information that the community could benefit from. The internet has made this ability

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obsolete because young members of society can just look up whatever they want to know on the
internet. Combining all of these factors results in the way that we see the elderly being treated in
the United States. Some of these same negative effects from modernization also exist in China,
but not all of them.
China has a rich heritage of strong family bonds, but recently that has been going away.
Before China started to develop, family members lived close to each other, normally in the same
village. This close proximity fostered strong relations between parents and their children
throughout their lives. As the country has become more and more developed, the newer
generations have been moving from their rural villages to cities in order to get jobs and support
themselves. This has fragmented families and severed many of these close bonds. The people
that have been most affected by this are the elderly. The loss of a connection with their children
has reduced the amount of relationships that they have and overall made them lonelier. However,
the Chinese government has created legislation that requires young adults to visit their parents
(Wagstaff). This legislation shows that close family bonds are so important in China that they are
willing to preserve this element of their culture through the law. This is very different than the
United States because the US government has not even addressed the treatment of the elderly as
an issue. The two countries that we have looked at so far are mostly modernized and developed,
but Mexico is not.
Mexico is unique from the other two countries because it is not nearly as developed and
globalized. The culture in Mexico is largely untouched because the country isnt very developed
and has not experienced much globalization. This results in the retention of many core beliefs in
Mexican society, one of these is that the elderly are important. In Mexican culture, it is thought
that older people possess an inner strength and are an integral part of the family (Mental Health

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Association of SE PA). Also, the shame that some elderly in the United States feel when asking
for help does not typically exist in Mexico. This allows for them to be cared for more easily by
their children as they get older. In Mexico, according to the MHASP, it is expected of the adult
children to take care of their aging parents and institutionalization is rarely done. This method of
treating the elderly allows them to remain included in society and leads to mental disorders to
have a later onset in Mexican elderly.
Between the three countries, we can see that the treatment of the elderly changes like a
gradient, with the United States at one end, China in the middle, and Mexico at the other end.
The primary differences between these cultures, in the regard to the treatment of the elderly, is
that more developed countries seem to treat the elderly worse than less developed countries do.
This could be caused by a multitude of factors, ranging from different work ethics to less
importance of the family in more developed areas. The core difference seems to be a
fundamental part of culture, however. In the United States and China, work ethic and success
may be more important in culture than family. In Mexico, family seems to be more important
than most other things and this accommodates for the better treatment of the elderly. At the top
level, it may seem that the difference between the cultures is due to different socioeconomic
factors, but peering deeper we see that it is simply a fundamental, deep-rooted difference in the
cultures of these societies and countries.

Works Cited

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Lin, Judy. "Honor or abandon: Societies' treatment of elderly intrigues scholar." 07 January 2010.
UCLA Newsroom. 10 December 2015 <http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/jared-diamond-onaging-150571>.
Martinez-Carter, Karina. "How the elderly are treated around the world." 23 July 2013. The
Week. 10 December 2015 <http://theweek.com/articles/462230/how-elderly-are-treatedaround-world>.
Mental Health Association of SE PA (MHASP). Mental Health/Aging Advocacy Project. 6
October 2004. 10 December 2015 <http://www.mhaging.org/info/10-04-Latino.html>.
Wagstaff, Keith. "In China, adults must visit their aging parents or else." 1 July 2013. The
Week. 10 December 2015 <http://theweek.com/articles/462599/china-adults-must-visitaging-parents-else>.