ABSTRACT
Concern about aging parents is increasingly heard among American adults at midlife. The problems associated with aging are coming into new focus in the context of a dramatic demographic revolution in life expectancy and longevity, of changes in family structure and the contested family values such change has generated, and of the shifting understandings of what it means to be old. David Fischer, among the first of American historians to study old age, has argued that the elderly were respected and venerated in early America, particularly among the Puritans who understood the achievement of advanced age as a sign of being among God's elect. The United States was late among industrialized countries in establishing a national welfare program for the elderly. There was clearly an economic need to do so by the beginning of the twentieth century. As the economic lot of older Americans has improved, so has the political clout of this group.
