People joked in private about raising children, of course, but it didn’t exist as much of a genre. People joked about parents - from classic Nichols and May sketches to SNL’s Gino’s Pizza Rolls skit - but jokes for parents, about their children, have been rare until recently. It’s hard to believe that before social media there wasn’t a robust tradition of jokes about how hard it is to be a parent. For that to change, we need shared material - images, scripts, stories, jokes - that make us feel like we’re all in it together. I have close friends who have recently cared for and lost parents and who went through the same profound isolation because they were tired of getting the same stilted expressions of sympathy every time they brought it up. When my parents were sick and dying, I barely spoke about it with anyone because doing so felt extremely socially cumbersome. Instead of your friends’ eyes glazing over or their immediately offering you bland expressions of sympathy, you might share some laughs and offer some perspective - not unlike how we act when we talk about our kids. Imagine someday having dinner with your usual friend group and talking about the caregiving relationship you have with an old person in your life.
One of the easiest and most fun ways to do that - as anyone who’s cared for a dying loved one already knows - is to laugh at the whole thing together. To cope with the intimate challenges of caring for and loving people who can’t care for themselves, it’s essential to humanize both ourselves and the people we’re responsible for. When it comes to living alongside old people in a mutually nurturing way, very few of us have any frame of reference at all. But these caricatures have nothing to do with real life. Why is it not funny on the internet yet? Is it because watching The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote as children gave us the false promise that our parents would be gleefully independent until death? We do fetishize certain old people - the very stylish elderly, or the exceptionally steely elderly, like RBG, or “adorable” grandmas. We are still very much in the era where caring for old people is considered a dreadful task worthy of pity. There is no “You’re doing great, Mama” discourse on Facebook for those who care for elders. And perhaps most important, elder care doesn’t have as many jokes. But elder care doesn’t have the benefit of being “the best job in the world,” or being cute, for that matter. Child care is hard in a lot of the same ways elder care is hard - there’s lots of room for personal baggage, interpersonal resentment, guilt, and (yes) anger. The elder crisis looms like a way-worse child-care crisis. Hopefully we’ll spend more time hanging out intergenerationally without making it corny. Perhaps older people will start working in child care alongside the younger people who typically do that work. What could that look like? It may mean adjusting to the pace of an older workforce, learning patience as people take longer to move around. The need to care for the growing number of old people is going to require our society to reorient itself toward the elderly.
history, there will be more people over 65 than under 18, and that gap will widen thereafter. America has always self-identified as a youthful culture, so what happens when so much of the population gets old? A recent piece by the New York Times editorial board laid it out in black and white: By 2034, for the first time in U.S.
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