Post Punk Kitchen Forum

When do these even start these days, anyway? My parents are a very youthful 60 years old, so I'm comfortable thinking of them as middle aged, but can't imagine thinking of them as elderly any time soon. My 90-year-old grandmother... sure, she's elderly or old. For whatever reason, it just hit me today that my parents are around the age my grandparents were when I was born (and to me they were always old)... but boy do times (and one's own perception of age) change!

Oh, okay... I guess we've got pensioners, senior citizens, retirees... anything else?

Silver... ? But the put out a silver alert when geriatrics go missing, so that might be a bad call. Maybe they're just baby boomers for now.

Just call them the tweens of old people.

My parents are both in their early seventies and definitely anything but "elderly". So if I count them as middle-aged that makes me (at 47) still very young!

Senior citizens are 65+ so maybe Junior citizens? Dark Ages?

I think some people still consider 60 to be middle aged

the word we use here is "third age" or "better age" ; kind of like "golden years".

i am ashamed to say that when i had my first melanoma surgery, the report described me as "a middle aged female". I was 30 years old. So i've been middle aged now for a while......

i think i like senior tween. i think it could catch on.

Huh. I've never thought of this but there does need to be a term. My mom is 68 and she sure as hell isn't elderly (she was at the doctor's yesterday and when the nurse called her name, she thought my mom had misheard her because she "was expecting a 68 year old woman and you surprised me.") But she's not middle-aged either, of course. Maybe it's not an age thing exactly, though... some 70 year olds are elderly and some 70 year olds are young.

Yeah, I've heard "golden agers".

Nice. I have to say, the definitions that have middle age starting at 40 don't ring true to me anyway (that'll be me in eight years). But that probably just means the image is changing, not the label itself.

I like "golden years" or "golden agers"! I can't wait to tell my folks that the PPK has spoken.

Huh. My in-laws are 59 and 63 respectively and they are anything but old, but I might call them "middle aged". It definitely is how the person acts, though, because I remember when my maternal grandparents were that age and they acted old and crotchety.

"In their 60s"

My Lifespan Development textbook has these chapters with regard to the ages you're referring to:
Middle Adulthood- "Statistically, the middle of life today is about 38 years of age... but what we think of as "middle-aged" comes later- anywhere from 40 to about 60 or 65."
Late Adulthood (broken down by various different developmentalists):
-young-old (65-74) then either:
-old-old/old age (75+) -or-
-oldest-old (85+)

Santrock, J.W. Life-span development. (2008).

I used to write survey questions for a market research company, and we referred to people in that age group as 'older'.

tweeniors

I like tweenior a lot. I hope to be very active and healthy in my tweenior years and plan on referring to myself as a tweenior. This will probably cause people to consider me senile.

This gets my vote!

Agreed.

It kind of sounds like something that belongs in a penis joke.

Yeah, I really don't think of "middle-aged" as the middle of life, but the middle of adult life. So like 50, not 38.

This is generally what I say for anyone between 50 and 70.

"Older" and "in their 60s" are excellent, sensible suggestions, but I'm going to take tweenior and run with it. I think my parents will approve. Thank you, oh PPK oracles.

Codgers.

I love "junior citizens."

You can get into trouble saying things like that on the internet.