Comparison of attitudes toward aging in the children of Fars, Kurds, Baluch, and Turkish communities

Background & Objective

In today's world, where many mothers are employed and have little time for their children, children's relationships with adults have become more critical. As far as can be said, their existence has been indispensable to prevent the vacuum in human and emotional relations. Strangely enough, some children tell their grandparents that children care about these relationships. Grandparents can significantly compensate for this lack of human relationships around the child. Relationships with children and grandchildren are usually more prominent in women's lives than men's. As the number of older adults in the international community, and in particular Iranian society in recent decades, has been increasing steadily, and this upward trend will increase significantly in the coming years, as well as the stereotyped perceptions of children. Now, considering what has been said and since Iran is a multi-ethnic country, the present study was conducted to investigate the differences in attitudes toward aging among children of Farsi, Kurdish, Baluchi, and Turkish population.

The present study was a causal-comparative study. The population of this study included all children living in Isfahan (Fars), Sanandaj (Kurdish), Zahedan (Baloch) and Tabriz (Turks) in 2018. In this research, 800 people selected using an available sampling method. The data gathering tool was a researcher-made questionnaire of attitude towards old age. Two-way variance analysis used for data analysis.

Findings showed that there is a significant difference between children of different ethnic groups in attitude toward old age (p<0.001). The results of Shafa's follow-up test showed that the attitude of Fars ethnicity was more positive than other ethnicities, Kurdish ethnic attitude was more favorable compared to Turk and Baluch ethnicities and Turkish ethnicity's attitudes toward Baloch ethnicity. The attitude of Baloch ethnicity has been worse than other ethnic groups. Also, the results showed no significant difference in attitude toward aging in each ethnic group between boys and girls (p<0.001).

Overall, the study's results showed that children's attitudes to the elderly are influenced by factors such as gender, the level of interaction with the elderly, and the type of their parents' views. Many scholars believe that the attitudes of aging phobia and anti-aging in modern cultures are more than traditional cultures, and believe that the aging period is associated with vulnerability and dependency and that it is passed down from generation to generation. It is also related to social issues.