Tag Archives: Ageism

‘I Faced Judgy, Thoughtless Comments When Pregnant At 42, This One Stuck With Me To This Day’

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When Lucy Baker was five months pregnant with her third child, a mum on the school playground exclaimed rather bluntly: “But you’re going to be 47 when the baby starts school!”

It wasn’t the first negative comment she’d faced since revealing she was pregnant at 42 – other “judgy, thoughtless comments” she’d been on the receiving end of included, “Why are you having another baby?” and “Was it a mistake?”

But the comment on the school playground really stuck with her.

At the time, she says she was “aghast”, but she later turned her negative experience into a positive, launching her blog the Geriatric Mum, which celebrates older mums.

“It’s been a real driver for me in some ways because I thought: you know what, I’ll bloody show you,” Baker, who lives in Lincolnshire and has three children aged 13, 10 and four, tells HuffPost UK.

Fast forward five years and Baker’s youngest child is set to start school in September.

To honour the occasion and “show the world how great being an older mummy can be,” the confidence coach plans to wear a gold, sparkly dress to drop him off on his first day.

The idea came about while she was doing a panel talk in London and was wearing the gold dress in question. “I talked about the Geriatric Mum story and the fact my son starts school in September,” she recalls.

“I said to the audience: ‘Actually I should do something big on the day, should I wear this gold dress?’ And the whole place cheered, so I thought: Well, I’ve committed to it now.”

Baker plans to wear the dress as a way of sticking two fingers up to society’s ageist views – which especially impact women.

“I want to do it as a celebration of geriatric mums – and for me and my little boy,” she says.

There is a deeper message she wants to convey by getting parents, particularly mothers – both on the playground, and reading this article – considering their actions towards others.

“As a geriatric mum, I’m trying to spread the message of: please don’t judge other women for their life circumstances, their choices, their situations because it’s really boring and actually hurts – these words stick,” she says, referring back to the comments she received during her pregnancy.

“I get messages on Instagram and women are feeling judged because of their age. It’s still happening and those labels are 100% out there.”

She adds: “I was really judged and nobody knows what I was feeling behind the scenes or what I’d been through to have my third child. Nobody knows what anyone else is going through.

“The journey to pregnancy is so unknown, but people are still judging other people for the age they have their children.

“I just want people to hold back on that judgement and pause for a minute and think: I don’t know that person’s story, so why am I judging them?”

But above all, she wants people to know she’s “loving being an older mum” – and endeavours to give other women who are striving to become mothers in their 40s hope.

“I’m in a great place in my life, I’m confident, I’m happy,” she says. “Motherhood is tricky whatever age – it’s really difficult, it can be very hard work, it changes your life. But I’m loving it – and I want the message to be: it can be glorious no matter how old you are.”

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What Is The J-Lo Effect And How Can You Channel It?

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You’re defying age and almost every other human standard? Congrats, you’ve unlocked the J-Lo effect. You’ve set the bar higher for everyone else? J-Lo effect once again. You’re dating a man whose hotness has now multiplied because of you? Ding-ding-ding, J-Lo effect.

Jennifer Lopez has done it all. Whether it’s frolicking under the Capri sun with her former flame Ben Affleck, showing off what the new 52 looks like, or just being a total badass at work, J-Lo is killing it.

The New York Times recently published an article marvelling at J-Lo’s professional and personal achievements, dubbing it the J-Lo Effect. The multi-hyphenate’s accomplishments include managing to secure $12 million (£8.6 million) to replace Simon Cowell on American Idol, plus booking a Las Vegas residency and the Super Bowl halftime show at 50.

Though she’s had her fair share of flops too, J-Lo has been able to do something other celebrities with a 30-year career have not: stayed relevant.

And her allure has been long recognised. The term J-Lo effect was first popularised in 2012 after Lopez’s American Idol success, setting off a string of other talent show judges asking for more pay.

A new context has also been added to the phrase – the desirability of Ben Affleck as a result of their pairing. By virtue of being with with her, Affleck is considered more desirable, or so the theory goes.

On Urban Dictionary, the J-Lo effect has a different meaning altogether – describing it as wearing tight trousers to make one’s butt look bigger.

To get more of an idea of this diverse concept, we spoke to Dr Hannah Hamad, a media and communication lecturer at Cardiff University, to ask what she understands the phrase to mean.

Jennifer Lopez performing in May 2021. 

Jennifer Lopez performing in May 2021. 

“The J-Lo effect is a phrase that has entered pop culture parlance and the celebrity gossip lexicon to refer to a phenomenon whereby the perceived sexual desirability of a man increases when he successfully couples with a woman who commentators and observers understand to exist in celebrity culture with higher levels of social, cultural and industry capital than him,” Dr Hamad explains. “In other words, she is ‘hotter’ than him, and she is ‘out of his league’.

“However, his levels of capital increase as a result of his association with her via their romantic or sexual relationship.”

Another connotation of the phrase is how Lopez bucks the trend for female celebrities being lambasted for ageing.

“In experiencing the levels of cultural cachet and industry power that she is at this time of her life (her 50s), she is bucking cultural and industry trends that have seen female stars criticised in the media for ageing appropriately – see for example the scorn that was heaped upon Renee Zellweger and the scrutiny to which she was subjected as a result of a noticeable change to her facial appearance in 2014,” Dr Hamad says. “Equally, we saw this in the ‘tragic spinster’ discourse that has attached itself to celebrity gossip media’s coverage of Jennifer Aniston in the post-Friends decades.”

She adds: “Lopez is not only escaping what previously appeared to be the inevitability of these cultural scripts of ‘bad ageing’ that attach themselves to female stars as they enter the mid-life decades, but is rather successfully channelling renewed confidence, energy and vitality into her celebrity career both on screen [her central figure in Hustlers is a glorious example of this] and beyond, as we see in the noteworthy levels of positive interest being taken in her reunion with Affleck.”

The rest of us might not have her fame and fortune, but we can certainly channel J-Lo’s big, baddie energy.

Life coach Kiran Singh says it’s more a state of mind. “Confidence is a daily practice. You need to connect with yourself and call out the limiting thoughts every single day,” she tells HuffPost UK. “You need to get yourself to a point where you become your own best friend, your own coach and your own cheerleader. Where you know how to talk yourself through moments of doubt and pump yourself up to take action.”

Singh believes confidence is a “by-product of action”, so you need to develop your own hype routine to pump yourself up to take action.

“Learn to love and validate yourself so that the opinions of others are irrelevant,” she says. “You do this by getting to know yourself and what you like about yourself and living in alignment with that and by overcoming the limiting stories that you are not enough through reprogramming your mindset.”

And lastly, remember “confidence is an ever-evolving journey, and the development of it is one that you will be on forever”. So if you’re not Jenny from the yacht just yet, there’s still time.

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Ageism In Healthcare And The Danger Of Senior Profiling

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March 27th, 2017 by in Health Policy, True Stories

We’ve all heard the saying, “age is just a number.” Nowhere is that more important than in the hospital setting. Over the years I’ve become more and more aware of ageism in healthcare – a bias against full treatment options for older patients. Assumptions about lower capabilities, cognitive status and sedentary lifestyle are all too common. There is a kind of “senior profiling” that occurs among hospital staff, and this regularly leads to inappropriate medical care.

Take for example, the elderly woman who was leading an active life in retirement. She was the chairman of the board at a prestigious company, was an avid Pilates participant, and the caregiver for her disabled son. A new physician at her practice recommended a higher dose of diuretic (which she dutifully accepted), and several days later she became delirious from dehydration. She was admitted to the local hospital where it was presumed, due to her age, that she had advanced dementia. Hospice care was recommended at discharge. All she needed was IV fluids.

I recently cared for an attorney in her 70’s who had a slow growing brain tumor that was causing speech difficulties. She too, was written off as having dementia until an MRI was performed to explore the reason for new left-eye blindness. The tumor was successfully removed, but she was denied brain rehabilitation services because of her “history of dementia.”

Of course, I recently wrote about my 80-year-old patient, Jack, who was presumed to be an alcoholic when he showed up to his local hospital with a stroke.

Hospitalized patients are often very different than their usual selves. As we age, we become more vulnerable to medication side-effects, infections, and delirium. And so, the chance of an elderly hospitalized patient being acutely impaired is much higher than the general population. Unfortunately, many hospital-based physicians and surgeons — and certainly nurses and therapists — have little or no prior knowledge of the patient in their care. The patient’s “normal baseline” must often be reconstructed with the help of family members and friends. This takes precious time, and often goes undone.

Years ago, a patient’s family doctor would admit them to the hospital and care for them there. Now that the breadth and depth of our treatments have given birth to an army of sub-specialists, we have increased access to life-saving interventions at the expense of knowing those who need them. This presents a peculiar problem – one in which we spend enormous amounts of resources on diagnostic rabbit holes, because we aren’t certain if our patients’ symptoms are new or old. Was Mrs. Smith born with a lazy eye, or is she having a brain bleed? We could ask a family member, but we usually order an MRI.

My plea is for healthcare staff to be very mindful of the tendency to profile seniors. Just because Mr. Johnson has behavioral disturbances in his hospital room doesn’t mean that he is like that at home. Be especially suspicious of reversible causes of mental status changes in the elderly, and presume that patients are normally functional and bright until proven otherwise.

Last month I hit a new age record at my rehab hospital – I admitted a charming, active, 103-year-old woman after a small stroke caused her some new weakness. She was highly motivated in therapy, improved markedly and was discharged to an independent living center. I bet she will live many more years. When I joked that she didn’t look a day over 80, she winked and told me she had stopped counting birthdays years ago. She said, “It doesn’t matter how old you are, it matters what you can do. And I can do a lot.”

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