2023-07-25 04:38:30
I am among those who have had the privilege of knowing all four of their grandparents and enjoying them all into adulthood. My grandmother Dora —the one who lived the longest— was a great-grandmother three times and, in addition to contributing to the care of her three grandchildren, she supported the care of her two eldest great-granddaughters for about a decade. My mother, who also did it, has already held her first great-granddaughter in her arms.
But what does this individual bliss mean when talking about human aging? This angle of the matter can best be appreciated through the call grandmother hypothesisformulated by American anthropologists James O’Connell and Kristen Hawkes, who “underlined the benefit of the relatively early cessation of female fertility in our species.”
Thus, menopause —say the researchers— should not necessarily be interpreted as “a sign of senescence or deterioration, but rather as an adaptive strategy” of A wise man.
According to the Spanish scientist María Martinón-Torres, in her book An imperfect manthis early cessation of female fertility is an evolutionary advantage that has contributed to the survival of the youngest members of the family.
The author bases her arguments on that of the aforementioned American researchers and delves into how, instead of continuing to have more children, grandmothers, throughout the history of humanity, have devoted their efforts to ensuring the transmission of genes through their descendants, as an active participant in their feeding, care and education.
“This fundamental contribution of grandmothers, today also extended to grandparents, is one of the identity marks of A wise manwithin the lineage of hominids”, underlines Martinón-Torres.
“Our elders are fundamental pieces in the care, education and maturity, also affective, of our children. It would be necessary to assess, sometimes, who depends on whom.
“They are also living repositories of essential knowledge for survival. They are the living memory of generations that we do not need to start from scratch and learn everything anew, each time, because we find in them the treasure of experience. Increasing the overlapping time between generations has been the catalyst for an extraordinary cultural richness in the animal world.
“In the light of biology, it appears that a prolonged ‘old age’ is the result of a successful strategy favored by natural selection.”
Cuba: aging of aging.
In Cuba, more than two million people are over 60 years of age. If this figure is taken into account, one might think that the potential of grandfathers and grandmothers is high. But there is no published data about it.
At the end of 2022, the estimate of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) reveals that the island shows a 22.3 percent population aging, which is not the same as individual aging.
The genesis of this accelerated demographic process lies essentially in the increase in life expectancy (78.4 years in general: 80 for women and 76.5 for men); in reducing infant mortality and other age groups, based on health programs; in the marked reduction of fertility and in a negative migratory balance.
On the subject, Dr. Liliams Rodríguez Rivera, director of Cited, an institution dedicated to medical care for the elderly, told the magazine Avances Médicos de Cuba that, in the country, “there is an aging of aging.
This means that “the population group that ages the most is that of 80 years and over, which is important to take into account for the design of public and health policies, to which is added the feminization of old age.”
Yes, he says, women live longer than men. “But many times in worse health than them due to the double workload, for being the caregivers par excellence of children, adults, the sick or dependents of the family, which means that they have less accumulated health in advanced ages.”
In this sense, the first degree specialist in Comprehensive General Medicine and in Gerontology and Geriatrics warns that there is little advantage to prepare ourselves because we are already an aging country, from the population and individual point of view.
If we parallelize aging with grandparents, in the legal field the recently approved Family Code in Cuba has recognized the roles of grandparents. The document, in addition to granting them rights, underlines the importance of these within the family group, that leading role that they have ultimately had in the survival of the species.
This is not the only legal norm in the world that protects the rights of grandparents, as the population is aging at an unprecedented rate throughout the planet, and it will accelerate as well. Data from the United Nations Organization predict that by 2050 the number of older adults will double that of children under five years of age. Will this mean that there will be more grandparents than grandchildren? (Taken from Cuba in Summary).
Cover image: Taken from Xataka.
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