What we’re missing out on when we don’t have intergenerational relationships, personally and collectively

This story was originally published in Group Therapy, a weekly newsletter answering questions sent by readers about what’s been weighing on their hearts and minds. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

I want you to take a moment to think about any significant relationships you have with people who are much older or much younger than you, outside of your own family.

If you’re part of a community that values or naturally encourages intergenerational connections, you might be able to name at least a few. But for many of us, including myself, our broader culture makes it so we only occasionally interact meaningfully with those outside our age group.

A 63-year-old Group Therapy reader asked a question that speaks to this problem: “What are some strategies for making younger friends? People my age (are) increasingly declining (or dead).”

I’m going to zoom out a bit to answer this one. To better understand how we might begin to bridge the divide between generations, I think it’s important to look at structural barriers that get in the way — and what we’ve lost individually and collectively because of that divide.

To begin to answer these questions, I spoke with Marc Freedman, founder and co-CEO of CoGenerate, a nonprofit finding ways to connect people of different ages, and Kate Hoepke and Sha’Nice Patterson of San Francisco Village, a nonprofit that connects older people to the community members and resources they need to live independently in their homes.

The history of age segregation

It wasn’t always this way.

As recently as the early 1900s, the United States was one of the most age-integrated societies in the world, according to historians.

“Older and younger people worked side by side in the fields of an agrarian economy. Multigenerational households were the norm. Even those one-room schoolhouses of yore frequently found children and adults learning to read together under the same roof. Indeed, there was little awareness of age itself. People didn’t celebrate birthdays. Most would be hard-pressed even to recall how old they were,” wrote Freedman and Trent Stamp of the Eisner Foundation for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Then industrialization came a-knockin’, and the drive for efficiency “precipitated a radical reshuffling of American life,” they wrote. A cascade of progressive reforms such as the Social Security Act of 1935 had the intended effect of providing a path for older people to retire, and thus shifting them out of the workplace during the Depression. “Then one after another we started creating these institutions focused on older people — nursing homes, retirement communities,” Freedman told me. Meanwhile, younger people were put into classrooms with same-age students because of new universal education and child labor laws, while middle-aged folks were at work.

“The collective result of all these things that are in and of themselves important and valuable was this grievous wound of our society, where the generations cease to meet,” Freedman said.

Why age segregation is a problem

One crushing consequence of this century-long trend is that older people are often disconnected from the rest of society, leading to isolation and ageism. Both are harmful.

Social isolation in older people has been linked to an increased risk of all of the above plus dementia, heart disease and stroke.

The negative health effects of ageism are also well-documented. When older adults are discriminated against because of their age, they will often internalize harmful stereotypes. In turn, they are more likely to become stressed, depressed or suffer other chronic illnesses.

“What we are seeing in public discourse is an increasing portrayal of those over the age of 70 as being all alike with regard to being helpless, frail, and unable to contribute to society,” eight prominent psychologists wrote in an academic paper about growing ageism during the early days of the pandemic.

In the past, it was a given that older people would be cared for by younger people in their families (which is still the case in many immigrant communities in the U.S.). The realities of modern life have made it so that elders often live far from their families, or the younger people in their lives are simply too busy or under-resourced to care for them.

San Francisco Village seeks to directly address this issue by matching seniors with volunteers (who are usually younger) who can help them with daily tasks like grocery shopping and dog walking. This helps Village members remain in their homes and the neighborhoods they love.

“Our social networks diminish when we get older, and it can feel like the walls start to close in,” said Village executive director Kate Hoepke, who is 68. “Intergenerational relationships help us stay connected to what’s happening in the world. Younger people are able to explain those tremendous social changes — not just technology, but multicultural America, and sexual and gender identity. Younger generations are so ahead of us in terms of inclusion and acceptance and caring for one another.”

Benefits of intergenerational relationships

The benefits of intergenerational relationships abound for elders. Generativity — or the drive to nurture and help develop the next generation — saves us from stagnation and gives us purpose. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began tracking more than 700 men in 1938 and continues today, found that older adults who invested in younger generations were three times more likely to be happy in their 70s than those who did not. They tend to be more alive, more alert and more optimistic about the future.

Rewards run both ways. When children and younger adults are siloed away from elders, they can develop narrow ideas of what it means to age, according to Shannon Jarrott, a social work professor at Ohio State University and expert on intergenerational community building who I interviewed last year. This can negatively shape how kids imagine their own futures as older adults; wildly, research has found that those with positive perceptions of aging live almost a decade longer, on average.

“When you separate people into different age groups, you don’t get a sense of what a whole life looks like in its varying chapters,” Freedman said. “This perspective is extremely important — that what’s happening in the present isn’t necessarily what will happen in the future, that there are multiple bites at the apple, that you don’t have to cram everything into this one period of your life.”

Freedman asserts that uniting the generations is vital to solving major social problems. He pointed to the work of social scientist Arthur Brooks, who argues that young people have particularly strong fluid intelligence, or the ability to think flexibly and solve novel problems. Meanwhile, crystallized intelligence, or the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past, tends to increase with age.

“Translation: When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them,” wrote Avery Forman for Harvard Business School.

Neither type of intelligence alone is enough to build movements that shift the status quo, Freedman told me. “Most effective solutions to problems come about from the combining of these perspectives,” he said.

Tomicka Glenn of BlackRoots Alliance, a Chicago coalition committed to the safety and liberation of Black people, wrote about how she’s seen this dynamic play out among activists: “Real transformative change requires us to stop strategizing within generational silos. Each generation has particular needs and visions for their future, based on the cultural conditions under which they were raised. And if those of us who may be seen as ‘elders’ are honest with ourselves, we can remember how much we resented being dismissed because we were young. Wisdom shows up at every stage of life, and if we are to pass on this planet to future generations, we must recognize the wisdom in one another.”

A 2022 survey commissioned by CoGenerate found that older and younger people are enthusiastic about the potential of working together to create social change, particularly when it comes to the issues of climate change and mental health. But age segregation has gotten in the way of this kind of coalition building; some 42.6% of respondents said they hadn’t spoken seriously in the past year with non-family members of other generations about a social, community or political issue — and nearly half of those people said this was because they don’t spend much time around people of other generations.

I can relate. Before the pandemic, one of the few places I regularly connected with people outside of my age group was at work. I turned to my older colleagues for their institutional knowledge, journalistic know-how, and general life experience (and thus greater perspective) I just didn’t have. But because I’ve been working from home for three years now, those organic opportunities have dwindled. I’m all about the flexibility that a home office provides, but I do think I’m losing out on chances to learn and collaborate that just can’t be replicated by chatting with senior L.A. Times staff over Slack.

What can we do about it?

Now that I made the case for why these relationships are vital to our societal health, I want to get back to our reader’s original question: “What are some strategies for making younger friends?”

Simply put, it’s not likely to happen organically. “In this highly age-segregated society where these kinds of connections don’t happen as easily as they should in the course of daily life, all too often they become a do-it-yourself project,” Freedman said.

Organizations like CoGenerate are trying to fix that by creating a more age-integrated culture. But say we do want to make this a DIY friendship project in the meantime, because we now know it’s so important. What can you do to make older or younger friends?

There are two ways to go about it, Freedman said: formal efforts designed to bring older and younger people together (like San Francisco Village), and concocting those opportunities yourself.

In either case, two key ingredients to building an intergenerational relationship are proximity and purpose, Freedman said. In other words, you have to see each other repeatedly and regularly, and you should have common interests or goals.

As far as programs that are designed to make this happen, they’re few and far between. And most are geared toward pairing older people with kids and teens. One great example of this is Sage & Seekers, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit seeking to combat social isolation by pairing high school students and elders, who have weekly conversations over the course of two months.

Otherwise, Freedman recommends thinking about where younger or older people with common interests are likely to be. Think libraries, musical opportunities like choruses and bands, and events at places like community centers, museums and bookstores. And as I mentioned earlier, getting involved in activism and organizing can be a great way to form meaningful bonds with people of different ages.

“Sometimes you have to be open to trying something new, and push yourself out of your comfort zone to find these kinds of relationships,” said Sha’Nice Patterson of San Francisco Village.

Patterson, who shares a deep, reciprocal relationship of care with her 93-year-old grandmother, also has some simpler advice for making cross-generational bonds: “If I’m at the grocery store and I see somebody struggling to reach something or to put something in their car, or if they’ve dropped something in the aisle, I’m there to help,” she said. “If you’re looking for those connections, people will almost always accept kindness. Being kind to people, being in that moment, has never served me wrong.”

Until next week,

Laura

If what you learned today from these experts spoke to you or you’d like to tell us about your own experiences, please email us and let us know if it is OK to share your thoughts with the larger Group Therapy community. The email GroupTherapy@latimes.com gets right to our team. As always, find us on Instagram at @latimesforyourmind, where we’ll continue this conversation.

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More perspectives on today’s topic & other resources

If you’re looking for some prime intergenerational relationship inspiration, look no further than this delightful piece by my colleague and friend, Deborah Netburn. This is the story of 86-year-old Reita Green the Wallpaper Queen and 28-year-old Beverly Pate, and their life-giving friendship. “I hang out with her all the time,” Pate told Netburn. “We are like, best friends. I don’t care about the club, I don’t. I want to hang out with Reita. I love this lady.”

If you’re looking for an organized and productive way to meet friends outside your age group, here are a couple. Big Sunday is an L.A.-based nonprofit that produces hundreds of events every year for folks of all backgrounds to get together and work on service projects. Similarly, Doing Good in LA is an online directory that connects social entrepreneurs and others looking for ways to improve their communities through innovative approaches.

One new trend in TV is the increasing prominence of intergenerational relationships, according to Next Avenue, a PBS publication aimed at baby boomers. Shows like “Hacks” (a personal fave) and “Slow Horses” show how different generations can work better together than alone.

Other interesting stuff

The 19th, an independent nonprofit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics and policy, is bringing together a group of mental health experts to discuss the impacts of loneliness and how to find community after three years of pandemic uncertainty, no matter who or where you are. You can sign up here. The online event will also be available for streaming on the 19th’s website.

Half a century ago, California policymakers shuttered state psychiatric institutions, denouncing them as inhumane, and involuntary commitment was deemphasized — the thinking being that the patient should have autonomy and participate in their care. Now, progressive leaders across California are now reconsidering involuntary commitments, a shift that’s dividing liberals over the very meaning of compassion.