Health and Well-Being in Late Adulthood

I work in a retirement home so chapters 24 and 25 related to my personal life heavily. I found the section of chapter 24 about health and well being very interesting. What caught my attention was the study that showed that elders that had mental decline were more likely to die soon. The two strongest predictors of whether new residents in a nursing home would die in the next years were intellectual decline and depression-not morbidity (Kane et al., 2010).  For the past couple years working in a nursing home, I've realized it wasn't always the residents that had physical problems that died first. Most times it was the ones that started to become forgetful and became anti-social that died soon after. I believe that we should take more time to do activities with elders that involve them to be social and to stretch their minds. I believe that in order to live longer, it helps to be socially engaging. On top of this, I believe that we shouldn’t act like the elderly can’t learn new tricks. Some still have the ability to learn and do great things in life if they are given the chance to. I'm glad I stumbled upon this section of the chapter because I was able to connect the dots to my own situations at work. 

Berger, Kathleen. (2011). The Developing Person Through the Life Span. New York, NY : Worth Publishers.