No 'senior' label for boomers

You can call them boomers, or you can call them the Me Generation. You can even call them the pig in the python.

Just don't call them seniors.

The population bulge generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964 shun that label because it denotes feebleness, frailty and old age. And when a demographic group this large is turned off, society takes note.

“It's great for my dad to go into restaurant and ask for the senior discount, but I just cringe. I just won't,” said Gene Hinkle, 52, an account executive at Bailey Lauerman in Omaha who recently worked with Immanuel Health Systems to rename its seven retirement communities Immanuel Communities instead of Immanuel Senior Living.

“We want to stay active and young,” Hinkle said, “and we're fighting aging every step of the way.”

It's just one more example of how marketers and advertisers have catered to baby boomers for the past 40 years - whatever they want, they get, regardless of how self-indulgent or silly.

Civic Ventures of San Francisco, a nonprofit think tank focused on “encore careers,” recently posted an article on its website, Encore.org, suggesting that activity centers for senior citizens be named “boomer centers” or “boomer cafes” to better appeal to the some 8,000 people turning 60 every day.

The posting attracted several responses, including one reading: “Bingo, Hawaiian Days, and travelogues belong to a different generation. My preference would be for adding resources, and multi-generational activities based on community needs and interest. For example, providing job search, business incubators, and skills workshops to name a few. Also, how about providing high quality coffees, and good danish selections?”

Will senior centers become “boomer cafes”? Senior living facilities “encore communities”? Senior discounts “special pricing for mature customers”? Obviously, there's a real danger of taking this too far.

Tom Jensen, executive director of Council Bluffs Senior Center Inc., said the organization named its $4.5 million, state-of-the-art facility the Center -- short, simple and straightforward -- because 55 percent of its 2,000 members are age 50 to 64.

So when the building opened in 2002, “senior center” wasn't an exact fit, he said. And some people are resistant to joining an organization with that name, Jensen said.

“To us, the term ‘senior' has status, there's nothing wrong with it,” he said, “but I understand why people would want to move away from it.”

Stefanie Weiss, vice president of communications for Civic Ventures, said there are few good words to describe aging or people of a certain age, generally those born during the post-World War II “baby boom” when returning military veterans began raising families.

Still, said the 51-year-old Weiss, “few people are OK with the word ‘senior.'”

The problem is that people, especially baby boomers, don't see themselves as the age they are, she said. And when, after all, does the “senior” phase begin?

The term might have worked better for the previous generation, Weiss said, when life and career followed a more predictable course: You worked at the same company for 35 or 40 years, retired at 65 and got the gold watch, and became a senior citizen.

But when life expectancy jumps from 47 at the beginning of the 20th century to 77 at the end of it, Weiss said, when does old age start?

Baby boomers' rejection of the term “senior” perhaps isn't based solely on the constant youthful image they have of themselves.

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, a visiting scholar at Boston College's Center on Aging and Work, has said that increased longevity added years to the middle of life, not to the end. If that's true, it really confuses what it means to be older, Weiss said.

“There's no language for this new phase of life. Everyone is casting around for the right word. My feeling is we don't have a term because we don't have any one thing that would work. ... It's a way too diverse population to describe in one word.”

Weiss said she couldn't pinpoint how or when the term “senior” emerged as a synonym for old person. “It's hard to know where these terms come from and how they stick.”

The Senior Times, an online newspaper published in Quebec, Canada, says the term “senior citizen” appears to have been coined “as a euphemism for ‘old person' during a 1938 American political campaign.”

Eventually, the Senior Times said, the term was shortened by some to “senior,” a term also used to refer to members of a graduating class in high school or college.

Eric Gurley, CEO of Immanuel, said the name Immanuel Communities suggests a collection of individuals, while “‘senior' harks of institution.”

Hinkle said Immanuel Senior Living had the focus and programming living well, exercising, keeping active to appeal to its future customers, the baby boomers, so dropping the words “Senior Living” was an easy fix.

The marketing campaign's tagline for Immanuel Communities “Uniquely your own” also should appeal to younger people, he said.

“It means being part of something larger but staying unique,” Hinkle said. “Boomers don't want to be assimilated.”

Interaction with retirement community residents has taught Gurley that people have a chronological age and an age that they see themselves, and they do their best to live that lifestyle.

Gurley, who describes himself as about 24 internally and almost 48 chronologically, is a boomer, but barely. “I'm at the tail end,” he said, “I'll be here to serve the ones preceding me.”

The folks in question also don't like to be generalized, he said, but that hasn't prevented them from accepting and even embracing “baby boomer,” which has defined them for most of their lives. So they can't use the old “I'm unique and defy generalization” excuse as a reason for their rejection of the term “senior.”

Maybe baby boomers are just more vocal and honest in rejecting a term that has outlived its usefulness. Gurley said his father-in-law is 90 but doesn't see himself as a senior.

“He defines others as seniors.”

Contact the writer:

444-1050, pat.waters@owh.com

« Metro/Region

Share