Engaging With Aging: A Framework for Managing Daily Living

Older adults live with the constant reality of having to manage their daily living with the emergence and progression of normal age-related changes that alter their usual capacities and resource needs. Although literature addresses successful aging, gaps exist in our understanding about how older adults manage daily living tasks, particularly from their viewpoint. To address this, the current authors propose Engaging with Aging (EWA), a perspective and set of processes older adults can use to approach daily living in a reasoned, purposeful manner that has similarities with clinical reasoning. EWA, a person-centered approach, can be considered citizen science in that it was developed by a nonagenarian based on personal experiences. Research using the EWA framework has the potential to advance the science of how older adults can manage and adapt to the impact of age-related changes to maintain independence and life satisfaction, and ultimately contribute to the development of care strategies. [Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 45(12), 13-20.].