Older people are worse at coping with stress than younger people

I run out of subjects to blog about so I decided to write about something related to my research project.  I picked the shortest research paper from my pile which happened to be on coping.  I started by finding the coping definition: coping is a response to stressful and upsetting events (Endler, 1996). Now I had to formulate a blog topic because coping is a very broad term. I found the age differences in coping quite interesting so I formulated a thesis statement: older people are worse at coping with stress than younger people.

Is my statement true? When I think about my elderly relatives I think it is true but what does the research say? According to Folkman et al. (1987), people cope in different ways as they age and that is because as people age they have different things to cope with.  Following this path, young people have to deal with stress associated with exams, getting a job, marriage etc., and middle aged have to deal with stress related to death of a spouse, disease etc.  It seems that younger people have to deal with eustress which is a positive kind of stress and elderly usually deal with distress which is a negative kind of stress.

Older people experience more stressors because they are ‘subject to biological deterioration, social extrusion, and economic deprivation’ (Lau, 1994) – that sounds very harsh :(.  Older people experience stressful events which occur one after another and they do not have time to recover before confronting the next stressor (Lau, 1994).  That indicates that older people are more vulnerable and being in middle age is stressful itself.  Also Evans (1985) claims that unpleasant life events occur more frequently in old age and increase the probability of getting ill.  Therefore, older people are stressed because of the age related issues, such as losing a job due to being less effective at work, and because they are stressed they develop an illness which causes them even more stress.

However, according to (McCrae, 1982) age does not have a negative influence on coping.  He argues that older people and younger people cope in the same way however they employ different mechanisms due to different types of stress they face.  Old people are more stressed than younger not because they can not cope with stress, but because they have more serious reasons to be stressed about and they are aware that in their age it is not as easy to solve problems as it was when they were younger.

In conclusion, my thesis statement is untrue because older people are as good as younger people at coping even if sometimes they seem handling stress worse than younger people.  This is due to type of stress and frequency of stressors they have to deal with over time.  Older people use different coping mechanisms than younger people because they face different kinds of stressors.