Like many other countries in the world, Germany is ageing. By now, no one can escape this insight. For decades, the Federal Republic of Germany was marked by a remarkable abstinence from population policy, both discursively and operationally. The bon mot handed down by the former German Chancellor Adenauer from 1949 to 1963, “People always have children,” is not only …
Why do we age? The answer to this question is critical to our ability to prevent and treat highly age-related diseases such as cancer and heart disease that now cause the majority of deaths in the developed world. For centuries aging has been considered an unalterable and therefore untreatable condition. We can find treatments for individual diseases but not for aging. Consequently, the effecti…
This book rebuts these erroneous ideas, but it does not replace them with idealized views of adulthood and old age. Rather, it paints an accurate picture of what it means to grow old today, recognizing that development across adulthood brings growth and opportunities as well as loss and decline. To begin, we consider the life-span perspective, which helps place adult development and aging into…