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Life expectancy of 53 does not usually mean nobody makes it to 60. In the early 1900s[1], life expectancy at birth in England was 53, but at the same time, as long as you survived until you were 20, your life expectancy had increased to over 60. If you lived to 50, you could expect to become 70.

https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Life-expectancy-...

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[1]: Not counting the years of the Spanish flu!

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Life expectancy is such a consistently deceptive measurement that I often wonder why it's not been replaced. Surely there must be more useful ways of quantifying lifespans, something like a "median age of currently living people"?

Point estimates in general are deceptive. It's difficult to capture the nuance of a full distribution with a single number.

I've had some luck with upper and lower percentiles, e.g. 5 % and 95 %. These cover 9 out of 10 people, which is large enough to be meaningful, yet not so small it's difficult to estimate.

To the parents point, you sort of made their point. “If you made it to x”. By having fewer older members of their population they likely had few joint problems reported overall. I would expect any reasonable study to control for this variable but a survey would not.

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