Old and Alone: Analyzing the Developed and Inherent Social Avenues for Elderly in a Modernizing Society

Worldwide populations are experiencing dramatic demographic shifts in the number of older? people due to improved medical care and family planning campaigns that have both decreased fertility and increased life expectancy. It is predicted that within the next few decades half the world’s population will be over 50 and in developing countries the elderly population will increase four-fold (Adhikari, 2012, 1). Since the aging process is accompanied by the loss of physical and mental abilities due to health-related issues, this shift will create many new challenges for Nepal. Modernization has increased the presence of globalized labor and migration to urban settings, which shifts family dynamics towards the nuclear family structure thus presenting an ambiguous division of caregiving responsibility between the family, the individual, the government, and the community. As these responsibilities encompass financial, medical and social needs, it is impossible for one party to address the entire burden; hence the importance of a network support system that sufficiently addresses these overlapping responsibilities