On Fridays at 10am, Richard Bement and Zach Ahmed join in the weekly video chat. The program that brought them together provides online discussion and suggests arts-related activities, but both are largely oblivious to all of this.
“We just started talking about things that were important to us,” said Mr. Ahmed, 19, a student at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Since the pair met more than a year ago, topics of conversation have included: Pink Floyd, in a long exploration led by Mr. Bement, 76, a retired sales manager in Milford Township, Ohio; their religious beliefs (the senior interlocutor is Episcopalian, the youngest is Muslim); their families? changing gender norms. and poetry, including Mr. Ahmed’s own efforts.
“There’s this fallacy that these two generations can’t communicate,” Mr. Bement said. “I don’t find it true.”
“Zac tells me about his organic chemistry class, about being a student in 2024. I get a chance to have Zack share with me what it’s like to be him and vice versa.”
The University of Miami launched Open Minds Through Art, a program designed to promote intergenerational understanding, in 2007 and introduced an online version in 2022. This semester, about 70 couples have enrolled in the video program. Another 73 students participate in OMA-sponsored art activities with people with dementia in a nursing home, a senior center and an adult day program.
There are thousands of similar programs, said Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United, which promotes such efforts. Intergenerational programs can include toddlers in day care centers playing with nursing home residents, older adults and elementary school children engaged in community gardening, or students and seniors joining forces against climate change.
“As the age divide in our society has grown, the impetus to try to bridge it has certainly grown,” said Karl Pillemer, a Cornell gerontologist who led the intergenerational communication research.
Factors such as early retirement, age-segregated housing and declining church membership and traditional social organizations have caused “a reduction in opportunities for natural intergenerational interactions,” Dr. Pilmer said.
“There are entire industries where older people are unusual,” he added, pointing to advertising, entertainment and technology. “Most people’s networks only consist of people 10 years older or 10 years younger than they are.”
One reason it matters is the well-documented burden of age on the health of older adults. Repeatedly, studies demonstrating the impact of older adults’ negative attitudes about aging, many led by Yale psychologist Dr. Becca Levy, have found associations between negative attitudes about aging and the risks of cardiovascular events such as strokes and heart attacks and psychiatric illnesses including depression. and stress.
People with positive feelings about age, on the other hand, do better on memory and hearing tests, have better physical function, and recover more quickly from periods of disability. And they live longer.
Age attitudes are formed early in childhood, but they can be changed, Dr. Levy found. Intergenerational programs are one way to address them.
For example, several OMA studies have shown that after just one semester, participating students had improved overall attitudes toward people with dementia and greater comfort with them.
In another study, younger participants developed greater affection, relatedness, engagement, and enthusiasm toward older adults with dementia, compared to students who did not participate. Research with medical students participating in OMA found similar results.
In addition, “as we have more information about intergenerational programs, several high-quality studies using comparison groups, the news keeps getting better,” said Dr. age among younger participants.
A recent meta-analysis of 23 studies of intergenerational programs from nine countries found other outcomes, including less depression, better physical health and increased “fertility” in older adults. The effects were small but statistically significant.
Genealogy refers to the desire to leave a legacy. Dr. Pilmer describes it as “a developmental need that older people experience, helping younger generations create a better world that they themselves will not live to see.”
In Rochester, New York, for example, young workers at the Youth Empowerment Center partnered with older members of a community group, Clarissa Street Legacy, to create a film and exhibit documenting a vibrant black community that was nearly destroyed by the construction of a freeway decades ago.
The teenagers “came to our houses with cameras and microphones and asked us questions and listened as we described what Clarissa Street meant to us,” said Kathy Sprague-Dexter, 77, who grew up in the neighborhood and saw the displacement. “Our thinking was that we wouldn’t be around for long. We need younger people to be a part of it.”
The documentary film has been shown in high schools and colleges across the country. the exhibit, after several weeks in a downtown art space, will reopen Feb. 21 at the Rochester Public Library.
“I don’t think we could have achieved this without young people, their ingenuity, their skills and their connections,” Ms Sprague-Dexter said. “They were carrying the load.”
Attempts to bridge a multi-generation gap do not always succeed. Programs come and go. A 2022 Generations United survey found that 40 percent of responsive intergenerational programs had been in operation for a decade or more, but nearly half had just started within the previous year.
“You can’t just put people in the same room and expect something to happen,” said Dr. Shannon Jarrott, a gerontologist and researcher at Ohio State University. The most effective programs provide preparatory training for participants at both ends of the age spectrum, he said, with activities and equipment suitable for all parties.
They work best with “consistent pairing,” so that the same two individuals “have the opportunity to continue to build that relationship,” Dr. Jarrott explained. More frequent interactions seem to have bigger results.
“What really works is equal status contact,” Dr. Pilmer said. “It’s not just a service project, mostly as a young person helping an old person.”
“It’s only been 150 years or so since people went to anyone other than the oldest person in a community for advice about finding a mate or what crops to plant in a drought,” he added. “It’s a dangerous experiment to have a society in which that doesn’t happen.”
At first, Mr. Ahmed thought of the program, suggested to him by a sociology professor as a way to earn extra credit in college, as a kind of favor.
“I signed up expecting to win nothing for myself,” he said. “The idea of old people getting older is rather depressing. They lose a lot of people in their lives.”
But as talks with Mr. Bement unfolded, Mr. Ahmed realized the program was helping him, too. “The things I’ve read about in history books, he’s lived,” Mr. Ahmed said of Mr. Bement. “It changes the stereotypical, stigmatized view of the elderly. They have stories and experiences and more life than I’ve lived.”
The couple is now in their third trimester. They met in person once, for dinner. “It was great,” Mr. Bement recalled. “My life has been enhanced by this relationship.”
Can they continue next year? “Why not?” said Mr. Ahmed. “I really value this friendship.”
Mr. Bement gained two new students to talk to, but said he would always make time for Mr. Ahmed.
