A Coalition for Better Birthdays is Born
In 2020 two organisations, Changing the Narrative in the USA, and Canopy in the UK began to play with the same idea.
How can birthday celebrations become a moment when we challenge our fear of ageing, and instead spread feelings of gratitude and hope.
In some parts of the world birthdays are celebrated with cakes, candles, parties, gifts and birthday cards. The nature of the celebration and the messaging which surrounds it is often different for different age groups and can sometimes reflect ageist attitudes and our anxieties about getting older. Feeling bad about ageing isn’t good for us and isn’t necessary, it’s actually ageism against ourselves! So it really doesn’t help if our birthday celebrations tell us a negative message.
One way in which people mark a birthday is by sending a greeting card. Often these say something simple and positive such as Happy Birthday! Or Congratulations! But some of the messaging on birthday cards aimed at people over 50 refer to changes which are seen as bad, such as changes to our bodies and our looks, changes to our memory and changes to lifestyles. This perpetuates ageist stereotypes which are negative and also not true. It's not only older people who get the bad messaging though, teenagers do and even some cards for those at 18 or 21 carry negative messages about ageing.
This is a public expression of ageism which has been going on for decades without being challenged or talked about. But we live in times when there is a strong desire to grow equity and leave prejudice and discrimination in all its forms behind us.
In 2020, on different sides of the Atlantic ocean, Canopy A make-over for your next birthday (card). and Changing the Narrative Birthday cards are ageist – but they don’t have to be simultaneously experimented with different birthday messaging. They created birthday cards which celebrated the opportunities of every age and invited everyone to think about their age in a new and energising way.
Thank goodness for internet searches because otherwise we would never have met each other! And so the seed of a partnership came into being, and we began to imagine together a global movement to grow appreciation of ageing in all its diversity through making birthdays better.
As we expanded our network of collaborators we invited Age-Friendly Vibes, a leading birthday card designer in this field, to join our core team. This has given us great insights and connectivity to the greetings card industry.
Ageism is a poorly understood source of prejudice and discrimination in our culture, and most of the work to combat it is done by policy makers, there arent many ways that every day people can join in with that.
Join us in the movement to support Better Birthdays by spreading the word to everyone you know who has a birthday (ie everyone), and buying age-positive cards. We can all work together to be part of ending ageism.
