Popluation Aging and Social Work Practice with Older Adults: Demographic and Policy Challenges

Living into older ages is changing from an exceptional to an expected part of the life course experience worldwide. Improvement in health and longevity across the lifespan also brings challenges for social work practice. At the same time, these changes are part of population aging trends that are not universal or inevitable. In addition, population aging discourse often reduces the complex dynamics of population aging to a problematic rise in older adults characterized as unproductive and dependent. Social workers can challenge the ageist construction of older adults by using our contextualized knowledge of how people age in their social environments