10 minutes
Growing older with a disability Understand how aging with a lifelong disability differs from other kinds of aging, and why the service system was not built for it.
What you’ll be able to do Describe three ways aging with a lifelong disability differs from aging without one, and identify one service assumption that does not fit. Compare the responses to this question and explain your choice: What is the most useful response? Document a next step for Growing older with a disability: Find out how a person in your area moves between disability services and aging services, and what changes when they do. A generation the system did not expect For most of the history of disability services, people with significant lifelong disabilities did not live to old age. Life expectancy for many conditions has risen dramatically within living memory, and the result is a large and growing population that the service system was not designed for: people in their fifties, sixties and seventies with developmental disabilities, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injuries sustained decades ago, and other lifelong conditions, now also facing the ordinary changes of aging.
Neither existing framework fits well. Disability services were designed around younger adults and goals like employment and independence. Aging services were designed around people who were not disabled until late in life, with different histories, different supports and different expectations. A person who has lived with a disability for sixty years and is now aging sits between the two, and the seam between them is where people are lost.
Three kinds of aging Aging without disability Acquiring disability late Aging with a lifelong disability
Gradual change from a baseline of full access. Retirement from work. Health conditions arriving in the sixties and seventies. Services designed around this pattern assume a home, savings, a spouse or children, and a lifetime of navigating health care.
A stroke, a fall, dementia. Disability arrives after a lifetime without it. The person and the family are new to disability, and aging services are designed largely for them.
Change from a baseline that was already different. For some conditions, earlier onset of age-related change. For many, physical wear from decades of managing mobility differently. Often no spouse, no children, limited savings, and a parent who has been the primary support for fifty years and is now in their eighties. Neither service framework was built for this.
Rewrite the plan for the age the person is What you can change You control whether a plan written at thirty is revised or renewed at fifty-five. Renewing it keeps goals that no longer fit and misses the ones that now matter.
What to watch for Do not attribute a marked change to aging without a medical evaluation. Aging is gradual; a change over months has a cause.
Your next step Review the plans for people over fifty in your area and ask which were written for someone younger.
The seam between disability services and aging services is where people are lost. Someone has to hold the person across it.
Carry this forward People with lifelong disabilities are living into old age in numbers no earlier generation reached, and services designed for younger adults or for older people without disabilities both fit poorly.
Some conditions bring earlier onset of age-related change; some disabilities make the physical effects of aging arrive sooner or harder; and a lifetime of limited access compounds both.
The transition between disability services and aging services is a seam in the system, and people fall through seams.
A tabs comparison of three kinds of aging, a scenario decision and a knowledge check.
Find out how a person in your area moves between disability services and aging services, and what changes when they do.
Browse and download only. Course notes are not typed or saved on this page.
Reset this lesson
Course overview Next lesson Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
