Why did grandparents in the 70s-90s seem older but yet more able bodied than younger looking grandparents today?
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Anonymous
+1 
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Anonymous
Isn't a sample size of 4 enough? |
Anonymous
| My grandmother never drove as they could only afford one car so she walked everywhere. She also had a lot of hobbies that weren’t just TV dependent and had grown up eating mostly her own home cooking as prepared food was expensive. My mom is a victim of our relative wealth — she retired in her 50s and has never really had to do a lot of walking and such since then and also has been able to buy mostly prepared foods. That said, she’s not actually doing that much worse than her mom was at that age. Modern medicine is great. But I do think the generation born around the turn of the century lived much less sendatart lives and ate less processed food. But smoking killed a lot of them. |
Anonymous
| They looked older but they were younger. They had pensions and could retire earlier and had their kids in their 20s and had grandkids in their 50s. |
Anonymous
| I agree this is ageist and just blatantly wrong. Both sets of my grandparents sat around with us and watched tv or played cards or cooked. Both of our moms (86 and 77) are traveling and doing activities with the grandkids. A step grandma is the youngest (70) and is the only one who isn't active. |
Anonymous
| My grandparents always seemed old and acted it. When they visited we almost had to toe around them. But they were always kind and loving so we loved them too. My parents are in their early 70’s and they take my kids to the park and go on the swings with them, play in the pool with them, play sports with them and keep car and booster seats in both their cars. |
Anonymous
+1 Less selfish back then, for certain! |
Anonymous
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70s kid here--I never knew my grandfathers, one died when I was a toddler and the other lived across the country and died when I was 10. I knew both of my grandmothers well (one set was divorced.) One grandmother was 64 when I was born and remained healthy-ish and active until she died at 93. The other was 74 when I was born and not at all active. She had painful knees and was pretty sedentary as a result. Neither never drove, but the younger active one walked or rode the bus everywhere. The sedentary one had a series of strokes and died when I was 12.
I think OP that there were definitely less healthy and fit grandparents then, but you didn't see them because they stayed home and watched TV or whatever. You saw the healthy ones because they were out and about. |
Anonymous
| I know what you mean, OP. I had grandparents who swam, traveled, had hobbies, socialized, etc. They were gray-haired and wrinkled. Contrast that to today, where we deal with grandparents (same age!) that just don’t do much. |
Anonymous
This |
Anonymous
More able bodied, live longer…..but a lot less less hands on. My grandparents were basically like nannies. Same with all my friends growing up - I knew so many of their grandparents because they were always doing school pickup, giving us rides to sports games at other schools, etc. In white middle class households in the 80s and 90s I felt like our grandparents were often standing in for our working Boomer parents. I had multiple friends being raised by their grandparents. Maybe it’s because I’m UMC today, but it feels like Boomer grandparents are a lot more hands-off and self-focused. |
Anonymous
They looked older because - relative to Boomers today - they smoked, drank a lot more, and lived through the horrors of WW2. They faced a lot more industrial pollution too - smog, polluted water supplies, lead and asbestos exposure, etc. The lived thru some sh#t. |
Anonymous
All you need is Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies & Uncle Joe (“he’s a movin’ kinda slow…”) on Petticoat Junction to know that old people were pretty out of it back in the 1960s. They’d been born before the Wright Brothers flew, & lived through a big depression & a passel of wars. They wore stiff leather shoes, didn’t have Gore-Tex nothin’ & used a damn road map to find places, so no wonder they were pissed off & worn out! |
Anonymous
Agree with all of this. |
Anonymous
I could have written same post. Boomer grandparents are just hands off! |