I have a confession, I do not have anything against Vera Lynn at all. There you go it is out of my system, I can move on now!
What I have got an issue with is that of peoples not understanding an individual’s cultural references. The amount of times I have visited Care Homes Jeremy Kyle on a muted TV in one room and Vera Lynn singing ‘There’ll be Bluebirds over the white Cliffs of Dover’ another room. When I have asked the staff “why Vera Lynn?” I get the “Well that’ what they listen too…!”
Now let’s do some maths, it is now 2018, the average age in a care home is roughly eighty, so that means the average person was born in 1938, so yes Vera Lynn would have been popular by the time they would be two year old, WW2 finishing when they would be seven years of age. So you are talking Ella Fitzgerald, Tommy Dorsey, Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mercer and Peggy Lee, to name a few.
Films on at the Pictures would have been Pinocchio, Bambi, Great Expectations, The Thief of Bagdad, though for many children it would have been Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Buster Crabbe at the Saturday morning Cinema session.
So what is my point, cultural references need to be understood and not assumed, they need to be individualised and not generic.
By the time our eighty year old would have been courting it would be towards the mid 1950’s, so the cultural references would have changed, Rock and Roll coming in, TV coming in more with I Love Lucy, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Lassie, The Twilight Zone and (please don’t ask me) ‘Leave it to Beaver’!
I could go on to when they would have had their children, what work they would have been doing, each with different cultural references. By now themes will have been forming, Jazz, Blues, Westerns, Horror, Comedy, etc, which means that a person may love modern versions of that genre.
(Please note I haven’t even mentioned, books, travel and hobbies, of which the same things would apply.)
So reminiscence should not be about taking a person back, it should be be about using the past to bring them into the present, into conversations about their memories, about them being in the ‘here and now’ with a person interested in them as an individual. For that it needs time, research and effort.
So please, if you are involved in the care for the elderly then please spend some time researching an individual’s cultural references so you can make every contact count.