Shownotes
Bessell, S. (2017). The role of intergenerational relationships in children’s experiences of community. Children & Society 31, 263-275.
Bostrom, A-K., & Schmidt-Hertha, B. (2017). Intergenerational relationships and lifelong learning. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 15(1), 1-3.
Even-Zohar, A., & Garby, A. (2016). Great-grandparents’ role perception and its contribution to their quality of life. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 14(3), 197-219.
Flash, C. (2015). The Intergenerational Learning Center, Providence Mount St. Vincent, Seattle. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 13(4), 338-341.
George, D.R., & Whitehouse, P.J. (2010). Intergenerational volunteering and quality of life for persons with mild-to-moderate dementia: Results from a 5-month intervention study in the United States. Journal of the American Geriatric Society 58(4), 796-797.
Geraghty, R., Gray, J., & Ralph, D. (2015). ‘One of the best members of the family’: Continuity and change in young children’s relationships with their grandparents. In L. Connolly (Ed.), The ‘Irish’ Family (pp.124-139). New York, NY: Routledge.
Hake, B.J. (2017). Gardens as learning spaces: Intergenerational learning in urban food gardens. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 15(1), 26-38.
Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J.F., Jones, B.G.B., Alvarez, H., & Charnov, E.L. (2000). The grandmother hypothesis and human evolution. In Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, edited by L. Cronk, N. Chagnon & W. Irons, pp. 231-252. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Kirkwood, T., Bond, J., May, C., McKeith, I., & Teh, M. (2010). Mental capital and wellbeing through life: Future challenges. In C. Cooper, J. Field, U. Goswami, R. Jenkins, & B. Sahakian (Eds.), Mental capital and wellbeing (pp. 3–53). Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Low, L-F., Russell, F., McDonald, T., & Kauffman, A. (2015). Grandfriends, an intergenerational program for nursing-home residents and preschoolers: A randomized trial. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 13(3), 227-240.
Murayama, Y., Obha, H., Yasunanaga, M., Nonaka, K., Takeuchi, R., Nishi, M., Sakuma, N., Uchida, H., Shinkai, S., & Fujiwara, Y. (2015). The effect of intergenerational programs on the mental health of elderly adults. Aging and Mental Health 19(4), 306-316.
Schwartz, L.K., & Simmons, J.P. (2001). Contact quality and attitudes toward the elderly. Educational Gerontology 27(2), 127-137.
Senior, E., & Green J. (2017). Through the ages: Developing relationships between the young and the old. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 15(3), 295-305.
Sun, Y., & Jiang, N. (2017). The effect of grandparents’ co-parenting on young children’s personality and adaptation: Chinese three-generation families. Asian Social Science 13(5), 7-15.
Whitehouse, P.J. (n.d.). Intergenerativity: Imaging between to imagine beyond. Taos Institute. Retrieved from https://www.taosinstitute.net/Websites/taos/files/Content/5694536/Whitehouse_-_Intergenerativity_presentation.pdf
Whitehouse, P.J. (2010, Spring). Taking brain health to a deeper and broader level. Neurological institute Journal. 17-22.
Whitehouse, P.J., Bendezu, E., Fallcreek, S., & Whitehouse, C. (2000). Intergenerational community schools: A new practice for a new time. Educational Gerontology 26, 761-770.
Transcripts
00:02
We want our children to have the best chance to live fulfilling lives, but can you keep up with all the books and scientific research on parenting, and fit the information into your own philosophy on how to raise kids? Welcome to Your Parenting Mojo, the podcast that does the work for you by investigating and examining respectful research-based parenting tools to help kids thrive. Now welcome your host, Jen Lumanlan.
Jen Lumanlan:Hi. This is Jen. Before we get started on today's episode, I just wanted to ask you a quick favor. I'd like to ask for your help and figuring out how I can best serve you and supporting your child's development and also making parenting just a little bit easier for you. I'd be so grateful if you complete a short survey for me, it'll probably take you about five minutes. And it will really shape the kinds of things that I work on over the next few months as I bring you new tools that I hope will really make a difference in your family life. Don't worry, the podcast isn't going anywhere. I still love doing it. And I actually have more ideas for episodes that I've ever had right now. And I especially love it when I get emails from listeners saying what a difference it's made in their lives. But the survey is going to help me to develop even more cool stuff. So if you appreciate the scscience-basedpproach to parenting and child development that I provide, then you'll probably be interested in what I'm planning next. So there's a link to the survey at yourparentingmojo.com/survey just to make it easy to remember. And once again, that's yourparentingmojo.com/survey. The survey is going to be open until midnight Pacific time on Tuesday, August 21st. So not very long. And after that time, I'm going to draw four email addresses from among the completed surveys. And I'll set up a 30-minute phone consult with each of those four people to help them address the most pressing parenting issue they're facing right now. So don't forget to put your email address at the end of the survey. Which once again, you can find it yourparentingmojo.com/survey. Thanks so much for your help. Here's today's episode. Welcome to today's episode of Your Parenting Mojo. This episode is part of our mini-series on intergenerational relationships. We started out with our interview with Dr. Rebecca Fenerci on intergenerational trauma. But I also wanted to look at the beneficial effects of intergenerational relationships as well. I'm here today with Dr. Peter Whitehouse, who I think we should call Dr. Dr. Peter Whitehouse. He's an MD PhD, and he's Professor of Neurology and either a former or current professor of psychiatry, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, bioethics, history, nursing and organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Whitehouse received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and his MD PhD in Psychology from the Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, he and his wife Catherine founded the Intergenerational School of Public multi age Community School. Welcome, Peter.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Delighted to be here, Jen.
Jen Lumanlan:Thank you so much. I'm so excited to get more into this topic. So let's kind of start deep into the weeds a little bit. You coined the term intergenerativity. Can you tell us what that means?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:So, the preamble to that is in our school and in my career, we believe words and stories are important. Sometimes we need to think about words as to whether they're outlived their usefulness, sometimes new words perhaps need to be created. English is wonderful that way. Generativity comes from Erik Erikson, who talked about the stages of life in older adults. And he had his second to last stage, which was generativity versus stagnation. This idea that you can contribute ideas actions in the world that are generative. That's a word that exists in the English language. All we did was put the prefix inter in front of it to signal that bringing together a sources of generativity creates an even more dynamic space. So intergenerational is one example of intergenerativity bringing the generations together, but it's always interdisciplinary and interprofessional and international. So it's a focus on connection. And it's time in the world, we believe, to highlight the value of diversity, whether it comes from differences in chronological age, or many other wonderful things that make human beings diverse.
Jen Lumanlan:Hmm. Yeah, I think that's a really important concept and one that has been undervalued, unfortunately, in psychology, particularly for a long time now.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Yes, in our country, we're very focused on individuals and autonomy. Another way we sometimes talk about intergenerativity, which we did when the whole community kind of defined the word was going between to go beyond. So the idea that the we really need to attend to our future together, particularly on this time of social injustice and global climate change. So intergenerativity is the word that asks us to be together. Now. So We can help future generations going forward.
Jen Lumanlan:That sounds awesome. So I'm curious if you can sort of help us to put into terms something that we may have understood a little bit already about, but about the general attitude of middle-aged people, I guess you could call me middle-aged now and young people, towards the elderly, in Western cultures, because it seems to me as though elderly people really do hold vast stores of information about culture and community and values. But we in our culture, put so much weight on what's new and exciting and happening now. And if there's any kind of problem, we don't care so much about what happened in the past, we just want the technological fix to the issue. So how does all this impact our relationship with older people?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:It is a problem that exists in lots of different countries. But as we might talk about later on different cultures have different historical attitudes towards older folks. In our western civilization that focuses on speed and technology, and money and ambition, the notion that taking the time to pause and reflect on how we got there, and why we're going where we are really creates a space where older people can contribute to that. But yes, there are many divides. There's also an attitude which is characterized in the aging community called ageism. And those gerontologists in the world are a bit confused, in my opinion, because they keep saying, well, ageism is discrimination against people on the basis of age. But then they talk about altruism. So I think it's really important to recognize that in modern democracies and, and places where older people have power, that if we don't attend to the health of infants and the education of children, we're going to have a form of discrimination against our future. So society really has to find a balance where the rights and privileges and contributions of people across the lifespan are valued, and we don't stigmatize people on the basis of age.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, I think that's fascinating. I've actually heard of the term childism as well. And the idea that children's contributions really are not valued in any way until they get to a certain age, and I'm not sure what the magical age is, maybe it's 18 when they become legally able to do a lot of things, but we sort of hold them to a higher standard than we do ourselves. We require that they use manners when we don't necessarily always use manners ourselves because we assume they don't know how if they don't do it. And we assume they're not capable of making decisions for themselves, when a lot of the time with input from us and support from us, they are capable of deciding things for themselves.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Absolutely. And that that border zone and adolescence is where depending on how somebody's developed, they may be able to make some decisions that we wouldn't expect them to. On the other hand, they may need decisions and guidance. That's the challenge in the joy of parenting to know where an individual youth that you meet with where they are on that journey towards assuming their status as a citizen.
Jen Lumanlan:And so you mentioned the importance of culture and all of this, and I think Japan particularly but China as well are sort of classically held up as examples of places where the wisdom of the elderly is really revered. And there's probably also a fairly strong filial piety issue at stake as well, particularly in China. But it's actually very common in many cultures around the world for the grandmother, particularly to take on what we might think of in the West as a more motherly role. And when I was doing background reading for this episode, I read about the anthropologist Kristen Hawkes. And she studies the hazard of people in Tanzania. And she hypothesized that it's possible that this arrangement might have really deep evolutionary roots, because the older woman is investing their energy and skills in rearing their grandchildren. And firstly, that makes the grandchild more likely to survive. And secondly, it frees up the mother to get pregnant again, she further helps the genetic lineage. And so I'm wondering, do you see a lot of useful ideas in how people and other cultures interact with the elderly generally, and specifically with grandparents in particular that we might be able to learn from?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Yes, in our country, the United States, we should look to people of Hispanic backgrounds because the Mediterranean cultures have a stronger extended family network than the more northern Europeans. But certainly, if you go to Japan and to China and India, the notion of respect for elders is much more ingrained in the culture. That said, and by the way, our first partner school with our Intergenerational School in Cleveland was in Tokyo, Japan, and we're now working on programs in India. So we have a lot to learn from those cultures. But a certain amount of the same trends have affected them urbanization, the fact that more people now live in cities means that the nuclear families, the young family moved to the city, leaving the older folks in the countryside, women working valuable in its own right, but also challenges family dynamics. I would say to you that I believe what you said about the anthropological studies and that for once we can generalize from existing cultures to perhaps the past, in our hunter-gatherer phase, I believe that elders because people still lived a long time, the life expectancy was lower, but we still had elders, the grandmothers who often get the attention can help child raising. But just think for a moment as a grandfather, which I am, who has lived and seen seasonal fluctuations, temperature variation that's affected the hunting grounds, or where the food sources can be gotten. So I clearly imagine a state where, in those days older people's experience with life, if not wisdom, contributed enormously to the success of the family and tribal unit.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah. And so from a tribal perspective, I can totally see how it makes sense. From a modern family perspective, I'm wondering what specific things you think that younger people, maybe even the parents themselves, but certainly the grandchildren. What do they gain from these relationships with older people?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:So what I sometimes jokingly say about the children and in our intergenerational school, is that we're trying to make them old, faster. You laugh, of course, what I really mean by that is mature faster. In other words, if you, for example, a story I tell all the time, we have volunteers, we have elders in our school, that have been activists, marched with Martin Luther King, saved our nature center from a corrupt politician destroying it. And so these kids by listening to the life stories of elders, particularly when they're told by people, that the kids have built a relationship with not just a one-off, kind of go to the library, not that that's a bad thing and listen to somebody talk. When you've got a relationship and you trust people and you share stories together, then I think those kids get life experiences that they themselves have lived through the eyes of others. And that's valuable, even if they weren't there at the actual time. I often say in our school, the kids see the past through the eyes of the elders, and the elders can imagine the future through the eyes of the kids a future that those elders are less likely to see than the kids.
Jen Lumanlan:And then they get scared, the elders by what's coming in the future.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Well, no, I'm not sure what you mean by that. You mean, they're scared of the kids are scared of what the elders, the adults have done to the world? That's where I think the concern should be. We really need to focus, as I said, before, on educating kids because we have created a mess with a whole bunch of complicated issues. So we owe it to our kids to make sure they're as educated as we can make them be. And I think intergenerational education, which gives people a sense of time and a sense of responsibility is one way to do it.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah. And so you mentioned the school and I want to talk about the school. But just before we go there, you mentioned the idea of looking to Hispanic families as a potential model of intergenerational relationships. And I firstly, just want to comment on the irony of that, and how in psychology often seems as though the White middle class family is seen as the epitome of what a family should look like. And that if other types of families would just try and be a bit more like White middle-class families and their children would be more successful in school and have better life outcomes. And you're kind of flipping that paradigm on its head there, which I think is awesome. And secondly, I'm wondering if you can point to some specifics about what happens in Hispanic families that you find could be potentially beneficial to middle-class White families or other families in general?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Well, I won't apologize for plugging our school doing. One of our three schools in Cleveland has a larger Hispanic population, it's one that I don't actually have much direct experience with. But so let me just generalize in what kids may get from that circumstance. When kids have a good relationship with elders in their own family, they are more open to, or even if it's not a good relationship, at least experiences, to relationships with adults and elders in society at large. I believe that our kids are able to be less intimidated, more knowledgeable about issues like Fitz is an older person with a hearing problem how to adapt to that. So I think the family experience gives you that. I also think, as a grandparent, myself, and I will mention that a few times more, I suppose that the step backwards from parenting allows the kids to talk to elders in the family in ways that are not as directly tied to the challenges in the parenting relationship. I'm probably being a bit long-winded about it, but the idea that if it works well, the elders can be the sources of counsel, removed from that direct disciplinary or role that the parent and stuff.
Jen Lumanlan:So it's sort of I think about the relationship between students and teachers. And the idea that it's very hard to have a really open relationship with somebody who's evaluating you, which is typically the role that a teacher. And so in a way, you know, it's not like the parents necessarily evaluating you, but they are trying to impart certain goals to you and bring you up in a certain way. And, the grandparent is sort of removed from that process, right, they have a stake in it, but it's not all on them. And so that frees them up to have a different kind of relationship with the child.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Absolutely. In my university life, I work with how universities adapt to the opportunities of aging, including the fact that most universities have a lot of older faculty, which is a bit of a challenge for them. So for example, our place and my alma matters, Hopkins have emeritus organizations. So I think that for emeritus faculty to have engaged kids, perhaps not in the classroom where there is that evaluation, but in other circumstances, like common readings, and the other thing I joke all the time about is and I think every older faculty member could do well by having a younger person who advises them. Because in the technology domain, it's comical sometimes to see the differences between professors and kids, kids, I'm calling on the other freshmen who come in. So I think mentoring an intergenerational mentoring relationship outside of formal evaluation can be valuable both ways.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's not just a one-way thing, it's the younger person has something valuable to contribute to this relationship. So okay, let's talk about the schools. So you and your wife, Cathy Whitehouse founded the intergenerational school. And it sounds as though it's expanded since then. I wonder if you can tell us a bit about the underlying principle of the school and who attends the school? And what does it look like if I walk into the building? How is it different from a typical school?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:So we started with a single public charter school, so it's a public school, but part of the attempt to innovate a public education by allowing some restrictions from the regular public school rules, although we have a lot of them. And we are required to have our students take the test, that is to say the students who are aged K through eight. Now we don't put children in grades, we don't assign them by chronological age or grade to a classroom. So it's developmental. So that's the first thing is developmentally appropriate learning. And it's learning in community. And of course, that directly translates to older adults, because older adults may be in different places in their learning. And so the idea that you don't put an older adult in a classroom because they're 64, or 62, or whatever it is, I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. So the lifelong learning developmental perspective permeates the pedagogy of the school. Also, we believe firmly in getting kids out of the classroom. So you might go to our school to answer that part of your question and see kids leaving on a field trip or kids playing on our intergenerational playground or kids in our intergenerational garden. If you go in the school, what you'll see is in the school that I'm referring to our first school, but in all of them, are spaces carved out for one-on-one conversations. So let me be clear that the older adults do not go into the classroom, sit in little chairs, and listen to the same lessons that the teacher might be offering to the students. The older adult volunteers, and they're adults at varying age, work with one class, and one teacher, and kids on an individual basis. So our signature program is reading mentoring, where a child will come out of the classroom, work with an older adult that they know well, and either read to or be read to, or tell a story from their lives or listen to a story from the adults live. So this is narrative experiential often service learning service to community education.
Jen Lumanlan:Wow, that's fascinating. And so my mind immediately goes to the benefits of one on one learning and the idea that well, it's too expensive. We could never give every child one on one learning. And that's why we need to use computers to personalize learning. When, actually, we have an entire ready and waiting workforce with a ton of experience who can help us to personalize learning to child's and children's needs.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:You are hired. That is well-put.
Jen Lumanlan:Thank you, I'll be your new marketing team. So you mentioned something that immediately caught my ear. You said intergenerational playground, what does that look like?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:So we've had two actually at our two locations. What it looks like is kind of universal design. So you want to design the spaces that allow kids to play with the equipment that is there their size, places for adults to sit and interact and spaces for private conversations, walking spaces, of course, disability-appropriate design. I'll say one thing I was part of the design charrette. And one thing I kept telling them is, we are actually in front of the schools in an old hospital, right in front of the ionic columns, which are part of the structure and a wonderful clock tower. So I actually wanted the playground to try to focus on this sense of time. And I want to have a walk that people could take where they would move through, in a deep time sense, the history of our universe. But basically, it's a safe universal design place to allow social interactions, the way that most playgrounds aren't between the generations.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, that's really interesting. And so what I'm also curious about is the academic outcomes of the children who go through your school. Do you see any benefits in the academic area, as well as potentially any shifts in their attitudes towards elderly people?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:So we have to take the standard state tests, which are a ridiculous game, in my opinion, but we are a public school. Our kids do well on those tests. So that's one measure, I would say more fundamentally, our kids have a very high attendance. And there are even stories of kids that don't want to go take a vacation, that we have a high percentage of parents who participate in parent-teacher conferences. So these are schools, where parents and teachers want to come and are engaged. The mission of our school includes lifelong learning, as I mentioned, and spirited citizenship. So I used to think that the ultimate measure of our school would be how actively our children engaged in the political process. Because I think you've prefaced your question to me by saying, you know, what's the purpose of schools? Well, the purpose for schools, increasingly, in today's context, is to get educated to have a job. It's the economic model. It's the neoliberal model. But I think that's a very distorted model. I think we need to recognize that schools are much more about creating people who want to be fully active citizens in society. We don't have those measures from our kids, we do have another measure, which is important. And that is our kids who graduate from our elementary school, do go to high performing innovative next-level education, to high schools and so on. So evaluating a school is got many, many components to it. Unfortunately, in society, in general, we tend to focus on things that are more easily measurable, but less important.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, for sure, I agree. And then, of course, I assume there are impacts on the elderly people as well. As I was reading through the literature on this, it seemed as though a lot of the studies in the space are really qualitative, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but they don't have great methodologies. And so a typical statement and one of the papers I read is this program was regarded as an overwhelming success by both the retirement village and the school involved. By all accounts, the success of the program exceeded the expectations of the staff, which is hardly a statistically rigorous assessment of the program's results. So what do you think about the way we study the benefits for the elderly people and whether there have been benefits for the elderly people?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:I think this is a challenging area when we're trying to be innovative when we're trying to address wicked social problems. What evidence do we need that some approaches are better than others? I'm going to tell you that a PhD in medical anthropology was granted by Oxford University to Danny George, who was our intergenerational coordinator. And with my help designed a randomized control study with both quantitative and qualitative aspects, to evaluate whether older adults with memory problems, with dementia, benefited from working with our kids in the school. We had a control group that people were randomly assigned to that who stayed in the long-term care facility and did a peer group intervention. And the quantitative piece demonstrated lower stress in the older adults who came to the school and a tendency towards cognitive improvement, a trend. It was a small study. I have done dozens of randomized control studies, as in my career as a physician. And this would not pass the highest standard of evidence for reasons that I could go into that some of them are, you know, are challenging when you're dealing with older people and kids. I'll tell you one little joke. So if we were to do the study carefully, we should have put everybody on a bus. The older people who came to the school came on a bus. The older people who stayed in the nursing home, stayed in the nursing home and didn't ride on a bus. Now I said if we were going to do a better study, we'd have the people in the nursing home, riding the bus in exactly the same route that the people went to the school dead, but just not stop at the school. And I said, who knows what went on in the bus. I told this story a few times and somebody said, You wouldn't believe what went on the bus on the way on the way back from the intervention. We talked about the kids and what happened. And so the bus was actually part of the intervention. Yeah. So you see what I'm saying, it's very easy to do a study when you've got two equally appearing pills, one of which is a placebo, and one of which is an active drug. When you're talking about complicated social interventions that deal with older people with cognitive impairment, and kids, which raise issues of ethics review that need to be taken care of, and so on. It's very complicated. That ours was a qualitative, the qualitative as well. So we collected stories. And interestingly, the stories reflected the lower stress the enhanced quality of life. And that's the measure that I study in my medical career, because that's what we really want to do. We want to have everybody have an experience that improves thinking, lower stress, but basically, you know, experiences that people want to have over again,
Jen Lumanlan:it's almost impossible to measure the thing that we actually want to be able to measure. And in some ways, we just sort of need to accept that it's probably happening, and worry less about if the difference is statistically significant or not.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:I think we have to be smarter about this. Because if you know consumer science based how much problems science has had with replicability in the pharmaceutical industry, the joke and it's not a joke. I mean, I work with the British Medical Journal, The Cochrane Collaboration and other credible sources, they'll do five studies, and they will popularize the two that were positive. And they will distort what randomized control studies really say. So randomized control studies are the gold standard because only people that have gold can afford to do them. And then when they do them, that's a joke. And when they do them, they can actually it's not a joke, if you want to look at the other level. So I think, yes, we have to be systematic, we have to consider what we take as evidence. But if we just thought that a randomized control study was what have to do would get us the answers would be sunk. Let me give you one last example. There's a study in an epidemiological study that says having a strong purpose in life. In Japan, they call it ikigai is important if you have a good purpose in life, a strong purpose in life, so you get less Alzheimer's. Well, that's a case-control study. And who knows, maybe people that have a strong purpose in life, you know, eat more beans, or have a better job or have a better family relationship. So I joke with the audiences, I say, okay, we're going to do a randomized control study, you're going to volunteer and half of you are going to be randomized to a condition where you're not allowed to have a purpose in life. It makes your point, right. Things that are really important in life, tend to get lost when you are trying to measure them. And if you can't measure them, the randomized control people say, we don't have a number that we can get our jollies over.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, yeah. And the replicability crisis is definitely not limited to the medical profession as well. We're seeing it loud and clear in psychology as well. And we've covered that a bit in the issue on the episode on growth mindset, where we talked about the fact that there's studies the beginning studies have never been replicated. So definitely familiar with that issue. So moving on a little bit in shifting gears, I think a lot of parents who are listening to the show are pretty conscious about how they discuss the issue of race. And they deliberately make an effort to discuss race in a positive way. And they sort of attempt to counteract bias. But I'm kind of willing to bet and I'm willing to count myself in this group that most parents are not nearly so intentional about the ways they describe old people and about how they talk about not wanting to get old, and maybe even the ways they joke about it. And I actually just started getting AARP membership cards in the mail. And so I joked about that in our house recently, although my four year old did not ask me what AARP was so I'm not sure if she got it. But I'm curious as to what effect are comments about these kinds of jokes and things that we just kind of say in our lives without even really thinking about it have on the way children perceive aging and elderly people?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:This is an important topic, already raised the issue of ageism, our society is an age death, dying society. We spend 10s of billions of dollars on wrinkle creams and this and that to appear younger. I think there's nothing more horrible than an older person who looks like they're working wearing a mask and they can't give you any facial expression because they've had all their wrinkles, botox to death. So yes, I think there's a great danger that the current generation of parents don't adequately realize how much their conditioning their kids think in that way. It's funny, though, because in many ways, when I say that, I think to myself, well look older people, what's a family for heaven's sakes, a family is an intergenerational unit. So why is that the we have to bring our attention to aging in a way that you might imagine it's more natural. I mean, it's not likely that these older adults, the parents, make too many ages, comments about their own parents, although it's possible. And that gets us into the issue of humor. I think you can overdo that, too. I mean, I think everybody who's you know, says some joke about a senior moment. I mean, I would say you were bordering on that, when you were talking about your four-year-old, not knowing what ARP, just call it AARP, she might like that better than a or mommy's a member of AARP. Anyway, but anyway, I'm not gonna give you parenting advice. But the point is, I think if we had a healthier attitude about it, we could probably joke about it more. But people are so sensitive to ageism, that you're not allowed to crack any joke about being old. And look, humor is such an important part of life. And there is another fundamental issue that that ageism relates to, we are all going to die, all those anti-aging people aside, who think we're going to live forever, we've done a remarkable job at extending life expectancy over the last, you know, 100 years. But the fact is, there are limits. And I think there's something that, for example, most parents probably do not have enough conversations with their kids about death. And yet, having older people around is an opportunity to have deep conversations about what it means to be a human being. So that you actually can be as vital as possible, why you're alive in a way that is not defying the endpoint. So I do agree with you, I think this is a hugely important topic conversation to have. But I think it gets back to parents and their relationship to their own aging or their own mortality. And that that gets back to, you know, to our dominant cultural anxieties.
Jen Lumanlan:Hmm, yeah, we actually in our house, we talk about death quite a lot. Not through any kind of design. But I did an episode on how to talk with children about death. And I typically recommend that someone listens to it if somebody posts in a Facebook group saying somebody has died, and I need to explain it to my four-year-old, but I'll say, here's something that could help but also just listening to it in advance and being able to talk about an insect that has died, or the pet rabbit or whatever it is, in a way that doesn't have to be anxiety provoking, I think can be really powerful. And I find that my daughter actually talks about death in a way that she's not afraid of it at all. We were walking home from getting off the bus A few days ago. And she just said, Mama, When I die, I want to be digged in a hole next to you. I said, Wow, well, I didn't actually say I don't I'm not sure I want to be digged in a hole. But I just thought it was awesome that she can think about that perspective and not have any fear about it whatsoever.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Well, I sometimes say that Plato and Buddha agreed on one thing, because Plato on his deathbed said to his disciples, his last advice was practice dying. But the fact is that death is a part of life. And I think both those the Greek and the Oriental traditions tell us that if you don't embrace mortality, you don't live as full of life as you could. And I think pats on opportunities to talk about it, or important opportunity to take advantage of.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, so getting into this issue about relationships between children and older people, kind of as they experience them on a daily basis, we've talked on the show before about how social groups form, and how people perceive people who are in the same social group as they are and how they perceive people in a different social group. And theirs are usually in a more negative light than the people who are in their own group. And I think if a person feels uncomfortable being around people in the other group, then they might avoid interactions with those people. And that reduces the opportunity for children and really people generally to reduce their biases and misconceptions they have about the people in the other group. And so I'm curious about whether you see this pattern that play with children's relationships with older people, because I'm just thinking about kind of anecdotally, when I was four or five going to visit my great grandmother who she was 107 When she died, so she probably would have been over 100 When I met her and I remember just being absolutely terrified of her. And I sort of see the same thing in my daughter when she interacts with our elderly neighbors. She just kind of buries her head in my neck and weren't really speak to them. And is it because she's not having enough interactions with them do you think? Or is there something else at play?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Again, you're identifying huge issues. I mean, I already mentioned the notion of intergenerativity, which celebrates differences and the importance of diversity. Our natural environment or social environment depends on diversity for kind of creative energy. But on the other hand, there's fear and there's discrimination and there’s tribalism. So this, this tension, we all feel in life about the security of the same and the danger of difference, boy, write that one down, I like that. The security of same, and the dangers of difference, you can turn that around. And I'm not going to try to do that, literally. And I think this is going to be a critical issue for the world, because immigration is going to continue, and the tensions around societies that are going to face an influx under very different circumstances, many of which will be driven by social injustice and climate change. So dealing with how we create and recreate communities. Ultimately, though, that I think it does depend on a sense of security. So your children, my grandchildren, my children, need to have experiences with diversity, where they themselves feel safe. If you are somebody who feels very insecure about your own social position or economic position, I mean, we're seeing this in the US and other places, then in that place of insecurity and fear, you're not going to be able to reach out and have that positive experience with diversity.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, and diversity of all types, age, and race and all other kinds as well. So there have been interventions designed to try and reduce children's bias towards the elderly. And we've covered in this show a series of interventions designed to reduce racial bias as well. And they typically are not very successful, some of them have the unhappy effect of increasing racial bias in children, which counters the aim of the entire study. So I'm curious about whether and how we can know if our attempts to shift children's attitudes towards aging and elderly people really do achieve their goal? Or is it just that children learn that making jokes about being old is not cool?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:In general exposure experience with people of different ages positive. I agree with you that it can go both ways. But our mentors get training on how to deal with kids, on our kids get education on dealing with elders, so they go in with some preparation. I'll tell you one anecdote. By the way, I have a new phrase, the anecdote is the antidote, meaning that the powerful story will overtake anybody's dataset, regardless of how big it is. I'm showing my biases here. And that is when we took our eighth-grade people who are just about to graduate from our school, let's say about 15 off to Toronto to visit some of my intergenerational collaborators in Toronto, they went to a long-term care facility where there were a lot of people from Eastern Europe. And the kids, you could watch them, they didn't hesitate to engage these elders who were different. Although there are a lot of elders from Eastern Europe and Cleveland, they were quite different, a different population. And the elders said, these kids were remarkable at how, I was gonna say graceful if you can think of a kid being graceful, how just easy it was for them, to start conversations and to do things that would have otherwise required a lot of warmup. And frankly, you just need to cross that bridge. Because once you get comfortable, and you get some experience with different people, you kind of learn well, there are people who are you're going to talk to that you're not going to have a good conversation even with or a relationship with others that you are. So it's the courage based on positive experiences that we can construct that then will allow kids to say, I'm going to take the risk and have that conversation with that older person. But if you don't have that experience in the first part place, and the parents and others are nervous about it, the kids are going to pick up on that right away, and they're going to be biased against having a good experience and towards having a bad one.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so as we sort of bring this back to people's families, I think in an ideal world, if children were around elderly people a lot, they would actually have a lot of these meaningful interactions. But I did find a study out of Israel that found that great grandfather's who lived with their children or very close to their children had essentially very few verbal interactions are shared activities with their great-grandchildren, even if they met every day. And so not everybody is living with or close to great-grandparents. But I imagine a similar age issue could come into play where both generations waited until relatively late to have children. And so I'm curious about ways that families can encourage these relationships, where they might be made more difficult by geographical distance or financial insecurities or physical illness or just a really big gap between the generations.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:I'd like to look at that study because I think the context is really important. The first thing I think about if it's a great-grandparent is hearing loss is a huge issue with older people and hearing loss can be isolating between older adults and adults, let alone kids. So just having kids learn that in communicating with older folks, you have to take your time for various reasons, maybe memory problems as well. I mean, who knows? So I think, again, as I said before, preparation is a good thing. The issue of, are there is too big an age gap. I don't know. I mean, to me, as I said, our signature program is reading, mentoring, our people with dementia read to kids or share stories from the long-term memory. I think, actually, I'm working on this idea, I think we need a genre of one of my colleagues calls big picture, big person, little person books. And I'll give you an example. Dream by the group in Canada that I mentioned earlier, the Legacy Project, which is designed as a picture book, to foster intergenerational conversations in a way that it's accessible to older and younger readers. So I think that kind of explicit strategy to have that great-grandparent given us a gift, a book that is in was intentionally designed to have that grandparent share that book with that child. Or maybe you give them each a gift, I'm just making this up on the fly for Hanukkah. And they say, Hey, I got this gift, it says it here I'm supposed to read it to you and vice versa. I mean, I don't know. But it seems to me that we don't tend to think about intergenerativity, you know, creating ways that we can foster it, we just kind of assume it's going to happen. And if it doesn't happen, then you know, somehow, it's disappointing, and it gets a spiral downward rather than a spiral upward.
Jen Lumanlan:So we need to be more intentional, if we want this kind of relationship between the generations, then we need to be working towards creating it sort of the how you live your days is how you live your life kind of thing. If you live your days, without ever doing anything about this, then it's not going to be a part of your life or your child's life.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Well, and your parents, have you so much to be concerned about or to see as opportunities in their own relationships with their children. I think what we're saying and it goes back to your earlier question, is that perhaps parents need to be thinking about this more explicitly. I mean, I will say, in modern culture, we just had our two of our grandchildren move back to Cleveland. And we remember, we were raising our three daughters, how valuable it was to have a grandparent that was willing to just babysit for a few hours or babysit overnight or later on, take your child to a museum or take a child on vacation. So there's an instrumental value to grandparents that perhaps were aware of free babysitting, but the idea that it's also free life experience, you know, maybe we need to play around with what that really means and how to foster that. By the way, I do think museums are a great place for that I do a lot of work with museums, they are the most natural intergenerational learning space we see. Because, you know, how many times do you see extended families or grandparents and kids going to a museum? So I've been trying to encourage museums to take a new attitude at enhancing the intergenerational learning because just because you have a grandparent taking your child there doesn't mean you've actually attended to creating learning experiences that would draw those two people together and give each one of them a meaningful experience from a different perspective that could be shared with the other person. So again, it's taking the opportunities explicitly and trying to work with them.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, and we've talked a lot about positive relationships between people of different generations. But I want to kind of address the elephant in the room, and which is sort of that not everyone is lucky enough to have a positive relationship with their parents. And even the people who do have a positive relationship might be listening to this show, because they're thinking, I love my parents, but I'm not going to parent my kids that same way. And I don't know how to parent differently. And so I'm going to seek out information on how to parent. And so in some ways, it seems as though your school bypasses a lot of these problems because the interactions are between the elderly and the children who aren't related and the parent isn't in the interaction as much. And in previous generations, it would have been a lot more common for extended families to live close by and the grandparents probably provided a lot of child care. But now that balance of power has really shifted and the parents can act as gatekeepers if they want to. And so I'm curious as to your thoughts about whether if parents don't have a great relationship with their own parents, should they encourage a relationship between grandparent and grandchild anyway? And what if your parents just have really different approaches to child rearing than you do?
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:This is interesting question because there is a tendency to be pollyannish about some of these relationships, and, you know, go flying on your metaphor, you know, normally think of it as the White middle class or upper middle-class family, but the one where the dynamics are good. As I said earlier, it's interesting, as a grandparent to watch your children be parents, because it is, in some sense, a measure of your success. Yes, there are lots of children who don't have great relationships with their parents. So what do I think about that? I think it's a new opportunity. I mean, I wouldn't shy away from it, I think you can learn about and perhaps improve your relationships with your own parents, if you create a grandparenting situation that allows people to be individual and express their own views. If there are tensions to begin with, then I think, a certain amount of honesty about, you know, the constraints around which grandparenting should be allowed. I mean, in the following disciplinary sense. I mean, there, there's no point in grandparents undermining what the parents are trying to accomplish that that creates an opportunity for sharing. But given that there are situations for example, with foster children, or others, where there aren't adopted or biological grandparents, I think that's the message of our school and use you set a while yourself. Maybe we can create grandparenting in type relationships, grandchild, grandparent, in context, where the parents are either not engaged, or the social set is different. It's about mutual learning, or mutual community service, which is not the general set of necessarily of grandparents and grandchildren in the context of family. So I absolutely agree with you. And I don't think it has to be an intergenerational public school. We're working with people that call them intergenerational contact zones. So whether it's a museum or whether it's a library, the idea that those programmatic spaces need to think deeply about how you create a space where people who are in a different phase of life can both gain and gain more, because they're both in that space.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah. And I want to be really specific on the topic of mental illness, dementia, Alzheimer's, and I know that's a particular interest and specialty of yours. And I get that in the school, it can be valuable to both parties to have that interaction between the older person who's struggling with that issue, and the younger person, and there's a lot of support around from people who are trained to encourage and support that interaction. But for a parent who is dealing with their own parents kind of decline into these kinds of diseases, I can imagine it must be very overwhelming to think, okay, how am I going to encourage a relationship between my child and my parent, when my parent doesn't even recognize me half the time? Do you have specific advice for parents whose own parents are experiencing these kinds of things? And maybe they want to encourage these kinds of relationships, and they just don't know how,
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:I'm certainly willing to offer some thoughts, I would say that it's very personalized because it depends on where they are in whatever process and how much relationship they have with the child before and the quality of the relationship with the parents, and the stress and the caregiving, etc, etc. So this is clearly an advice, where one on one conversation might be more helpful. That said, I think you'd go with where the person's strengths are often with people with memory problems, that their long-term memories are quite intact. There are remarkable stories about the power of music being preserved, there are photographs, folk can stimulate thoughts, watching old films can do that. So what you need to do is to create a space where you tap into who that person is, and as a human being and their strengths, then I think you just you do have to kind of educate the kids about what memory loss means. The problem with the way we view Alzheimer's and dementia is we medicalized them. So I have cared for 1000s of people with memory problems, and then wrote a book called The Myth of Alzheimer's. That sounds provocative, but basically, all we were saying was Alzheimer's is not one thing. It's very heterogeneous. And to one degree or another, everybody as they get older, has some memory and other cognitive challenges. So this relationship between normal aging and severe brain aging or Alzheimer's disease is in fact act unresolved. So the notion that, you know, a kid might be told your grandmother has Alzheimer's, she's got to, you know, be careful, she doesn't lash out at you or she thinks that people are out to hurt her. And we don't want to have you. In other words, if you focus on the fact that somebody's got a medical condition that is supposed to create fear in everybody, and leads to bad behavior, how are you going to get around that the idea that you say to the child, well, Grandma is getting older, and as people get older, a lot of people develop some memory problems, and your grandmother's gotten quite the this point. So she can't remember this. And that, you know, just relate to your grandma the way you would and compensate for it like it was a hearing loss or something else. In other words, you keep the child to do the workaround. Actually, I think our kids who have a lot of contact with people with cognitive challenges of different degrees do better with that they can adapt, perhaps better than the adults can.
Jen Lumanlan:Yeah, that's, and they learn from it, and they take it forward into their lives. And maybe this will ultimately benefit how we all interact with each other. And when as parents get older, that things will be improved for us.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:Well, I just add on that note, we're getting to the end of our time. So I work a lot with age-friendly communities, dementia-friendly communities. And what I say all the time is, look, let's not create an age friendly community, a dementia-friendly community, or nature-friendly community. If we develop communities that are more open to human diversity and human challenges, then the child with autism and the older adult with dementia will be treated in a space that ends up being better for all of us. The more we compartmentalize people and categorize them as sick or diseased, the more we're afraid of them. The more we create a community in which fear rather than care and compassion is the dominant theme.
Jen Lumanlan:What a powerful note to end on. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today.
Dr. Peter Whitehouse:You are welcome. I enjoyed it. And thanks for your series.
Jen Lumanlan:Thank you. As a reminder, all of the references for today's show can be found at yourparentingmojo.com/intergenerationalrelationships. And while you're there, don't forget to go to yourparenting mojo.com/survey to fill out the survey and be entered to win a 30 minute consult with me to address your most pressing parenting issue.
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