This is the story of Better Birthdays (in the UK), it all started back in the lockdown days of the pandemic, remember them?
I had been working with Dr Hannah McDowell (co-founder of Canopy, a social imagination project) on various programmes. We decided that we needed to focus upon ageing across the life course. There is so much focus is on 50+ and little on changing attitudes to ageing from the get-go of birth.
So in 2020 rather than sitting on our hands we ran a variety of online sessions and thought what better way to highlight the issues and attitudes towards ageing than birthdays and birthday cards? We set ourselves the challenge of designing anti-ageist cards.
You can hear me tell the story in the podcast section of this website.
The brief for our anti-ageist cards was, first of all, it needs to be nice, beautiful or funny. Nobody wants to give or receive a birthday card that is an educational lecture on positive ageing. Secondly, it needs to be for everyone, not a special ‘chin-up’ card for older people, as being targets, even for positive messages, just reinforces the same problem (ie. old = bad, therefore you need some extra cheer via this card). So the card must be for people of all and any age. Third, it needs to directly speak to the experience of ageing or challenge fearful attitudes towards ageing, rather than being ‘ageing-neutral’ as the millions of cards which carry a nice picture and blank inside already do perfectly well.
Working with professional doodler Jen Danger of Danger Doodles [https://dangerdoodles.com/] we developed three designs. It was a humbling and enlivening experience to explore images and words together, the brief prompted us to think very deeply about what we are saying and showing how it might land for different ages.
Serendipitously that same year we discovered on the other side of Atlantic ocean, Changing the Narrative – Birthday cards are ageist – but they don’t have to be [https://changingthenarrativeco.org/2020/09/14/birthday-cards-are-ageist/] – 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.
As we expanded our network of collaborators, we invited Age-Friendly Vibes [https://agefriendlyvibes.com/], a leading birthday card designer in this field in the US, to join our core team. This gave us great insights and connectivity to the greetings card industry.
In August 2022, the Better Birthdays campaign [https://www.betterbirthdays.org/] went live with the website launch. One of the goals of the Better Birthdays campaign is to Influence the card designers, manufacturers and retailers to start making and selling age-positive cards.
In the UK we started meeting with senior executives in the UK Greeting Card industry to raise awareness of the impact of ageism on people’s health, wellbeing and life expectancy. As a result of these meetings ageism was added to the agenda for the UK Greeting Card Association’s diversity and inclusion committee and an explanatory blog post about the Better Birthdays campaign included on the Association’s website [https://www.gca.cards/a-call-for-age-friendly-cards/].
In 2023 the February issue of Progressive Greetings (the UK industry’s magazine) [https://issuu.com/maxpublishing/docs/pg_february_2023/66] included a two-page article, Age Old Fun, focusing on ageism in Birthday cards from within the industry with a range of designer’s perspectives commenting upon the issue.
A breakthrough came later that year when we were invited by the Product Director at UK Greetings to run an online workshop about ageism in birthday cards for their staff. UK Greetings is one of the major players in the UK greeting card industry and brokers the card displays in the main supermarkets and retail outlets such as Sainsbury and Tesco, as well as supplying others and 2,500 indies.
In July 2023 we were contacted by the project lead of the UK Greetings [https://www.ukgreetings.co.uk/] Insight team which supports their product development teams. She informed us that as a result of the workshop she was heading up a project looking at their current birthday card range, and identifying gaps, which would hopefully lead to the development of new designs. She was interested in the choice of cards we had used to illustrate what a ‘good’ age joke looks like, versus a more negative one, and found our research interesting.
On 4th June 2024, UK Greetings launched a series of age-friendly greeting cards produced by Age Friendly Vibes. These are now available in independent stores and will soon be available in supermarkets.
Ageist or just intimate banter between friends?
One of the insights that emerged during our meetings with senior executives in the Industry was that the majority of ageist cards are sent by older people themselves, and that we must assume they aren’t doing so to upset their friends.
They explained that the relationship between sender, recipient and card is highly nuanced, “it’s a ‘triangle’; you can’t take the card out of the relationship and understand what it means or the impact it will have, the meaning is held within the relationship. What may look like an ageist card mocking physical or mental changes to us, may feel cathartic between peers who have noticed and even worried about change in themselves”. The industry believes that in the vast majority of cases, the sending of these cards creates a sense of camaraderie, playfulness, reassurance and intimacy between sender and recipient. We weren’t there to argue with them. After all, we don’t imagine that many people who send these cards intend to cause offence or harm. But that doesn’t mean that no harm is done.
What happens when these cards leave the ‘bonding banter’ triangle? What happens when they sit on a shelf in a supermarket looking out at everyone, free from the context of friendship and camaraderie? What happens when they are put on the mantelpiece facing everyone at the birthday party? They tell everyone who sees them that to grow old is to become less, is to be ridiculed and avoided if possible.
Our key takeaway message from working with the greeting card industry is that it confirms our experience that general awareness of ageism is low. This has been demonstrated through our surveys and discourse with members of the public. This is especially true of realisation of internalised ageism and how it influences our outlook, behaviour and decision-making. However, it was so inspiring how quickly people “got it” and responded accordingly, noticing ageism’s pernicious appearance in cards and how they might create cards that alter our stereotypical attitudes to ageing and reference age differently, with humour, but in a celebratory way.
It’s not about what we would do differently, it’s about what we must continue to do.
We must become the change ourselves; let’s aim to call out ageist “banter” amongst our peers, friends and family, and most of all with the conversations we have within our heads about ourselves. It’s not easy to go against the grain of culture, and challenge those we love, we can promise it won’t always go down well, but if we can invite ourselves and others to build a better future with more freedom for people of all ages that’s a brilliant gift to leave or those who are to follow. If we don’t challenge ageing negativity we older people continue to be the problem!
What you can do…..
• Buy Age-Positive cards (Explore the Better Birthdays site to understand why & find better options.)
• Take the survey Take the Survey — Better Birthdays [https://www.betterbirthdays.org/take-the-survey]
• Let us know your favourite pro-ageing cards
Dave Martin
If you have any questions, you can contact the author on lifecourseageing@gmail.com
