Skip to main content

Modernization Theory of Aging

This video presents the same text shown beside it, spoken and on screen. It adds nothing the text does not say.

State

Modernization theory of aging holds that industrialization lowered elders' status by replacing the extended family, which gave them a role, with the nuclear family.

Show

An extended family relied on an elder's labor and knowledge; an industrial economy needs neither.

Watch for

This theory is distinct from Soc 0872's modernization theory of inequality; they share only a name — mechanism and subject both differ.