Retired Boomers Who Reject Children Live in an Unhealthy World

By Randa Abdel-Fattah, Theage.com

February 23, 2009

Australia  

IT CAN be tempting to dismiss the gated, age-segregated retirement community explored by American journalist Andrew Blechman in his book Leisureville as a uniquely American phenomenon. Only about 100,000 Australians live in age-segregated communities, mostly in Perth and the Gold Coast, compared with 10 million Americans.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that between 1999 and 2031 our population aged 60 and over will double, increasing from fewer than 3 million to more than 6 million as baby boomers move into retirement.

With the ageing of baby boomers increasing the demand for independent living in retirement villages, the reasons that drive baby boomer Americans to age-segregated communities may well apply equally to Australians.

If Blechman's book is anything to go by, it is an alarming prospect. In Leisureville, he explores the world's largest gated retirement community, The Villages, in Florida. With all the trappings of countless recreation centres, pools, hobby clubs, restaurants and golf courses, it is a seemingly attractive place in which to live out one's retirement.

Picture this: 160 kilometres of trails with residents travelling everywhere on golf carts (some of them done up to look like Hummers and Mercs). It's almost Flintstone-like in its charm. No teenage road ragers here. There can't be. No one under 19 is allowed to live in The Villages, and you must be over 55 to buy a home.

The surreal world Blechman chronicles is all the more disturbing given that children are excluded, forbidden to stay for longer than 30 days a year.
The growing reality of Western society is that families are more scattered and fragmented, and senior citizens living in suburban sprawl are increasingly forced to look after themselves. Further, not all ageing baby boomers are content to sit at home waiting for their families to find the time to visit them, their identity solely defined by their status as grandparents.

And so, on the one hand, I am sympathetic to those who defend their right to withdraw into a space in which they feel safe, relevant and independent. Less crime, less noise, less generational conflict. Surely one has the right to edit friction out of their life?

Defending life in a 55-plus bubble, one resident asked: "What's so wrong with being in your 60s, having raised your kids, worked hard, and now wanting to live without children? It's a lifestyle choice. So what if we live in a bubble? It's our right."

But this is not a rights-based issue. It is the damaging consequences of exercising the right to choose to live in a community that excludes young people that is the problem. The underpinning philosophy is ostensibly economic, rather than deliberately discriminatory. As Blechman explains, "Children cost money. A community without kids is a community without schools and with no high taxes to pay for schools."

A community that refuses to invest in the future sends a message that there is no value in giving back to society unless one directly reaps the rewards. Not only is this selfish, but it is self-destructive.

A successful society demands co-operation. It demands that the rewards reaped from the work of past generations are repaid by investing in future generations. Turning your back on young people contributes to the very fragmentation of social values about which you complain.

I can well understand that alternative housing choices are often sought because of concerns about safety, transport and access to recreation. My grandmother has considered moving from her home of 30 years because her local council recently cut bus services in her street. Now, the only time she can leave the house is when one of her children or grandchildren is available to take her out. In the absence of a strong network of welcomed family support, a community geared towards serving the specific needs of society's senior citizens is a wonderful thing. But to exclude children from such a community is counter-productive and represents a dangerous retreat into an unreal and unhealthy world.

While not everyone identifies with the image of the doting grandparent, I still believe it is a generalisation worth making. Children are therapeutic. Amid the noise, tantrums and mood swings, there is the exquisite ability of children to make one smile. Every generation has a habit of romanticising its youth, lamenting the changing values and morals in young people. Even accepting the proposition that society is in its worst moral decline, with less respect shown towards the ageing, cocooning oneself in a bubble is not the solution. Since when has segregation ever achieved anything less than alienation, resentment and intolerance?

By all means, our ageing baby boomers should be able to retire as they please. But what kind of legacy do they leave when they choose to close the door to the real world, shutting out those who need role models? It is the difference between retiring with one's head held high or one's face turned away.

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