This week on the Where Parents Talk podcast, host Lianne Castelino speaks to Sharon MacKenzie, educator, founder and Executive Director of i2i Intergenerational Society, mother and grandmother about building intergenerational relationships.

MacKenzie, an educator with over 30 years of experience, shares her insights on the vital importance of intergenerational connections between youth and seniors.

Founder of i2i Intergenerational Society, she highlights how bringing these two groups together can significantly improve mental, social, and emotional health for both parties.

Through engaging stories and personal experiences, Sharon illustrates the transformative power of these relationships, showcasing how young people can break down stereotypes and foster mutual respect with older adults.

Reflecting on her journey, she emphasizes the necessity of intentionality in creating opportunities for interaction, urging communities to prioritize these connections. With the growing number of seniors in Canada, Sharon advocates for a collective effort to bridge generational gaps and enrich lives on both sides.

Takeaways:

• i2i Intergenerational Society connects youth and seniors, fostering meaningful relationships.
• Sharon MacKenzie emphasizes the importance of intentionally bringing younger and older generations together.
• Intergenerational programs improve mental health and social interaction for both seniors and youth.
• Involving students in activities with seniors can break stereotypes and enhance community bonds.
• Parents are encouraged to model positive interactions with older adults for their children.
• Engaging children with seniors early on can reduce ageism and promote understanding across generations.

Links referenced in this episode:

• intergenerational.ca

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In this podcast, we explore the impact of hormonal changes, device usage, and social media on discipline, communication, and independence.

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Links referenced in this episode:

• whereparentstalk.com

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is an educator with more than 30 years of experience teaching from kindergarten to university.

Sharon MacKenzie is also a speaker, curriculum designer, and founder of the Eye to Eye Intergenerational Society, an organization whose mandate is to bring Canadian youth and older adults together. She's also a mother of three and a grandmother of six. And she joins us today from Revelstoke, BC. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me and thank you for your interest in the topic.

It is such an important topic, especially for where we find ourselves in the world today. Why was it important for you to found the Eye to Eye intergenerational society more than 15 years ago now?

Well, there's a, a preamble to that.

I, I was from a relatively dysfunctional family and without seniors from neighborhoods and people that were around me, I'm not sure how I would have turn. It was wonderful. I had so many seniors in my life that were very important to me. So I had had that as a history and as a teacher.

I just sort of continued that. So I had seniors coming in. My students went out and interviewed seniors. We had seniors who would share skills and so forth.

And what happened was while I was doing that, I always left the site thinking, there's so much more, so much untapped opportunity here. And so that really made me stop and think how could I, how could I do more? And French immersion was very popular in Brit Columbia at the time.

So I thought, well, intergenerational immersion is a good idea. So I called up a neighbor of mine who had just bought a care facility. And we went, we chatted and she said, I said could I bring my class over?

And she said, oh sure. What afternoon would you like to come? And I said, well, actually I'd like to kind of move in. I said I'd like to come for a couple months.

So she was, whoa.

So we went over to the, the site and they had a chapel and I was able to, it was very, it was adjacent to the, the housing units and I was set up a temporary classroom.

And during the day we shared curriculum, we shared activities, we shared community involvement, environmental. We had a, we had a scholarship program. We had all Sorts of things that we worked on together. And that went on for two and a half months.

And then throughout the rest of the. The kids would make contact with the seniors once a week. We'd either have them over to our school or we'd go. And so that was that.

The research from that was just amazing. I actually started thinking I was going to break down stereotypes of seniors, of young people and young people of seniors.

There had been home break ins, true seniors homes by young people and there was. Seniors were kind of pushing back a lot with the young people as well. And so I thought, well, we'll break down the stereotypes.

But minute we opened the door, a million things started happening and it was so incredibly successful that we just decided we had to keep going. And unfortunately I had. It takes one person to start something.

I had a new administrator that came in and said, you're not leaving the school, you're not taking the kids out of the school. So that kind of ended that. So I quit my job and we started the Society.

And the Society was really, it involved some of my students from 10 years prior. So they were on the, the board of directors, some of the seniors, some of the care workers.

So it was really a collaborative community effort to create the society.

And the idea was that we would take the, the good word that we had got going and we take that out to the rest of Canada which I didn't realize how big Canada was until I decided to do that. So we, yeah, work coast to coast trying to share that, that research and the positive nature of the, the relationships.

Such an interesting background story there. And it's, you know, it sounds like you were just really driven by passion but also your own lived experience.

It sounds like, well, you can't imagine how amazing it was to come back from the care center on the bus.

And I would sit there and all I had really done was move my class from the school to a different spot and made connections with, with people, with other people that just happened to be older grown ups and the sheer joy in the bus of the kids laughing and saying oh, did you know and did you and did you hear from John and go carrying on? And I'd get off the bus and the parents would greet the students as we arrived. I had tears in my eyes.

Like it was just, it was just one of those things, they were so happy. It just improved health, like right across the board. Mental health, social health, emotional, physical health.

Because the seniors, you know, would get out and play bocce with the kids or go for a walk when otherwise they would just be sitting maybe in front of the TV or reading a newspaper or whatever. So what drove me to, to do that was just, it was so much fun. Like, who's going to turn away from something that costs nothing?

Takes a bit of organization and a lot of respect and time. But I mean, you know, seniors and kids, they do have time. We just have to see how we can prioritize it so that they can come together.

And so, yeah, that was, that was what really drove it.

You described the bringing together of those two groups and the interaction that ensued as spawning a million different things. Take us through some of the, the main things that you saw and the ones that really struck you personally.

Okay. One of the things that quite happened that happens, like isolation and loneliness. Why. Why do we get ourselves into that situation?

And trust me, ageism and isolation and loneliness is not just for seniors, it's for kids too. And as a teacher, I had a lot of kids that would hang around after school because they were just too lonely.

They couldn't go home, their parents were working, they didn't want them to have friends in. So I think what.

One of the things was people, there were kids that were out of school time and there were seniors who were now not working that had this lack of purpose and a lack of empowerment. They weren't really in charge of anything. They weren't in the work world anymore.

They, they didn't, you know, they just weren't in a position of power. And so that was really offsetting for them.

And one of the, one of the examples that I like to use is I had a, a senior that was in the care home and she had, had, she had two sons and one was brutally killed in, in a confrontation with another man. And she had just gone into herself. She was very quiet, she was very sullen.

She'd come out for dinner, but then she'd go right back to her room she didn't participate in. And all of the residents, they, they weren't drawn to her because she just kind of gave off really negative and sad vibrations.

And so they, they would kind of leave her alone. In the same way.

I had a student who had come to me from another school, another area, a dysfunctional family, and a lot of really serious problems, and he was in gr. He didn't know how to read.

So when he first came to our school, the, the teaching staff, you know, tried to work with him right away and he was violent. He would scratch all, take his pen and scratch everything on the board off and rip things up.

And so I said to him one day, I said, you know, we're going to the senior center for two and a half months and what do you think about reading with one of the seniors? And I guess, you know, he sort of thought, well, that can't be too confrontational. So I went to the Mrs.

Culp in the, in the care home and I asked her the same thing. I said, I have Jonathan, he's in grade six and he can't read and he's come from some pretty tough times. You think that you could read with him.

And so she said, oh, that would be fine. She'd only gone to grade six herself and she figured if Jonathan couldn't read, at least she'd be a bit ahead of the game on that one.

So they started out with a 20 minute period and that went to 30 minutes. Pretty soon it was 20 minutes three times a day. Pretty soon I had to go up and actually get them out of the room and say, come on.

Getting involved with the activities because all they wanted to do was be together and read. And at the end of it, Jonathan learned to read.

And about, oh, five years later, I was working in Toronto and I got a phone call quite late at night because this was. Some people were from British Columbia got a phone call quite late at night saying, and it was Jonathan's grandmother.

And she said, she said, I just had to call you to tell you that Jonathan brought his report card home today and he had all Cs and C and Bs. And that was all because of Mrs. Colt and what happened at, at the Coldstream Meadows. So, you know, I mean, that was a life changer.

That's granted, it's two people and, but it changed their lives dramatically. And, but there were other situations. There was one gentleman who wouldn't participate in anything at all.

And then the kids had a net out in the, in the grass area, grassy area, and they were playing volleyball. So he was walking by and one of them said, hey, do you want to play?

And so he went over onto the grass and he was popping the ball, ball back and forth.

And I took some pictures of him and he said, and I gave one of the pictures to him and he said, well, I'm taking that picture down to the, to the driver education office and telling them that if I can play volleyball, I can sure keep my driver's license. So he just kind of enlivened again about some of the possibilities that he thought, hadn't thought about for a long time.

A lot of the times the kids would remind the seniors of fun things that they had done or the seniors would start sharing things that, that then the kids would say, oh, I've done that too. And so it was just, you know, the sheer joy and there was changes in the people one by one, but there were also changes within the whole group.

It just made everybody feel more, again empowered and more part of the community and definitely in a lot of cases more purposeful as well.

You mentioned some of the research and what the research shows in this area. Are there any specific statistics or areas of the research that you can share with us that really speaks to the.

Well, you know, I've approached the medical profession quite often to see if we can kind of work something out. The problem with things like this, where you have people coming together is it's a, they're soft skills, they're soft things that happen.

It's not really data driven. Like 12 seniors did this and 14 kids had a change in their lifestyle, etc. Like that's not really what you end up finding out. You, you.

And it was very interesting because in the first, maybe the first 50% of the pictures the children were down on the floor at the side or at the knee of the seniors. And then, then it shifted so that as we went through the year, the kids were actually standing and assisting the seniors.

Like there was just a shifting of roles, both physically. You could see it, they were just coming together.

And then the last few months they're, they're both helping one another, they're both coming together.

So in terms of, sadly there, I mean, if you validate testimonial research, if you validate pictorial research or data, yes, there's, there's lots but. And anybody you talk to, and there's quite a few people in, in Canada who are doing a lot of intergenerational work.

Now again, it's hard because it's so spread out, you maybe don't hear about it, but they will all tell you the same thing. It's just magical.

Fast forward 16 years from when you started this whole enterprise and we're in A world today where there have never been more generations coexisting at the same time in human history. What strikes you most about where we are today on this topic?

Well, I guess the one thing that surprises me, I mean I've been at this for 20 years now and what surprises me is that there's not more people like yourself who are interested in this topic. I mean it's, you have seniors in every community across Canada, as you've mentioned.

You've got kids in every community across the country and you have that isolation and loneliness as a number one health concern even before COVID in those two age groups. So why would we not try to really bring seniors and kids together intentionally?

And intentional involvement, respectful in fun ways and it's not expensive. It's really a matter of what we say with our organization is that you take and look at what, what you're already doing and just do.

You don't do a different thing, you just do what you're doing already differently. And so I think that's one thing that strikes me. Why has it taken 16 years to get people, you know, in the media interested in talking about this?

And why, why are there not intergenerational projects in every school? Like what, what's holding us back? The other thing I guess is that you're right, there are multiple generations.

One of the things, like my field of intergenerational I should have identified that right at the beginning is I look at the people and the older people. So 55 plus and anywhere from toddler right up to university age. And I see it as hitting both ends of the, of the spectrum, the aging spectrum.

And the reason that I'm really dedicated to that youthful aspect or the young, younger people is it's like investing in insurance. Because by the time those young people are finished high school, their, their parents or their grandparents are going to be aging.

It gives them a different orientation towards aging. It makes them less fe their own aging. I think it makes them less fearful of death.

I think it makes them more aware of how they can help, that every age and every stage has, has challenges and how they can be helpful even though they're just a young person, how they can help an older person. So but now I think there's, I've been approached by quite a few groups that are worried about generations in the workplace.

So now we're talking about younger seniors and older seniors. So we've got 80 year old seniors or 75 year old seniors that are working in the workplace along with 55 +. So it's really interesting.

The whole intergenerational thing is popping up throughout the, the age groups. But for me, I'm kind of dedicated to the insurance plan.

And you know, the other thing that we tend to neglect to think about is that when young people have positive experiences with older people, those people, those young people might choose as a profession, a helping or a caring profession. So they might become LPNs, or they might become nurses or doctors or social workers with old in geriatric facilities.

So I think that's a real plus too.

Your organization provides tools and resources for educators and others who want support in this area. Could you give us and illustrate for us what types of resources you provide?

And also, Sharon, if you could describe a little bit about the programming that you were talking about earlier. What did it entail? How was it designed to bring together these young students and these older adults?

Are you referring to the actual curriculum that we did during the middle school project? Well, interestingly enough, again, it gets back to the same thing.

Everybody's so busy nowadays, they don't have time to do a whole new curriculum or do a whole new something. And I think that's one of the reasons why people back off and say, oh, that's not for me. I just don't have time.

I think what you need to do is take what you're already doing and look at it from two different perspectives. So, for example, this is a really simple one.

But if you're looking, looking at, there's a book club and there's seniors that are involved in reading a book and coming together once a month to discuss. Well, kids are reading books too, so why not read the same book and come together intergenerationally to have that discussion? Art. We just finished.

There's a wonderful opportunity in art where they. This was kind of cool, actually. They had the seniors and child come together and they created a piece of art, 2D or 3D art.

And that part was really interesting. It happened over a period of three or four weeks.

But then at the end, and as part of the display at the art show, they had the senior write a paragraph about what that experience was like. And they had the student write an experience or write what their experience was like.

And then they posted those beside the art piece, which was really revealing. It was very, very exciting and really fun.

So I think the, if you go to Intergenerational ca, which is our website, there are, I don't know, seven or eight resources there that are very comprehensive. A resource is only as good as, as you make It. So I think, you know, it's a great place to go and look at the resources.

They're funded by Public Health Agency Canada, the Ministry of Health and New Brunswick Ministry of health in B.C. and a couple of community groups that are provincially mandated. So the, all of it is there.

There's a, a great body of, of research or not sorry, research, but resources to go to, but you've got to make it work for you. So once you've got an idea and you think, jeepers, this intergenerational thing sounds kind of interesting, what could I do?

Especially like if you're with parent association with your school or whether you're a teacher yourself, the opportunity there is to go and look at the resources and say, whoa, that's a great idea, I could change it or I could use it as is, or whatever. So I don't think there, I mean there are, there was one organization out of Alberta was called Linkages. Unfortunately there's.

After years, 20 years of working in Calgary with programs just like you're talking about, more specific. They lost their funding. So they're, they. We don't have them anymore, unfortunately.

But I think that it's really important to realize that it doesn't take much. You just. I, I wasn't expecting this to be a video conference today, but I was.

I have a pair of glasses that are made out of an old coat hanger that I put on. And what I try to remind people is just to take a different perspective, look at it from a different ang.

Because really this is what we should be doing. We should be doing this right across the country. And why did we stop? Because when Canada was in its earliest ages, families were really important.

And then all of a sudden we've got people whose grandparents are on another continent or we've got a mother and dad who are working on either side of the province. And sometimes it's really hard to get together with older folks within your family.

So I think that you just have to make that time and make that effort to bring that together in an easy way and a fun way.

As a mother, as a grandmother, as an educator and somebody who's been in this space for, for decades, what would you say are specific tactics that parents can take in the home, in their own homes to foster, to nurture, to cultivate a better understanding of older adults that they may encounter, you know, at school, in the workplace eventually and elsewhere in their lives?

Else. Well, you know, we run. We ran into this problem with Meadow School Project is that there was this this parental warning, don't talk to strangers.

Right. And that really is tough when there's an older person, you know, trying to reach something or get.

Pick something up and having trouble with it, that the young person feels that they can't go up and say, can I give it. Give you a hand? So I think parents can model their approach to seniors. Today's June 15th. It's World Elder Abuse Awareness Day.

And that is a day when we really have to stop and think about how many things we do that are very ageist, like whether we're making fun of somebody with gray hair, fun of somebody who's really slow getting their change out. They're an older person getting their change out at the till, at the grocery store. It doesn't really matter. It's so subtle in our society.

And so I think that parents can bring the attention to their, to their children about said if somebody's saying, oh, there's that old person next door, that old man next door, find out his name, see if you can go over and give him a hand when he's having problems and just really open your life, make some time. If you've got older people in your family, prioritize your time and, and you know, give them that opportunity.

One of the things that, that I'm not sure how this really specifically relates, but is something that I'd like to, to tell you about is that a lot of times we have families that come together, Christmas or a holiday, birthday or whatever, and there's grandchildren and grandparents, older aunts and uncles and parents and so forth.

And you say, oh, well, my family gets together quite often, but I had a little boy in my class and he had grandparents in the town that I was working in. And his mom and dad had a family dinner every Sunday with both sets of grandparents, and he have three brothers and sisters.

But he'd come just tearing into the classroom so excited about going to Cold Stream Meadows. When's the bus coming? When are we going? And I said to him one day, I said, jeremy, why is it that you're so excited to go and see these older people?

Because you have older people in your family and, and you see them on a weekly basis. And he said, but they never come to see just me.

So I think that that's a really important note for parents, if they have grandchildren and grandparents to give opportunities where those kids can be one on one with their grandparents and they don't have to do anything special. They can just play cards, play a board game, go for a walk.

But Give them that one on one opportunity to get to know one another and have respect for the life experiences both the young person has had, but also for the older person, their life experience as well.

Is there a certain age that you would suggest?

And certainly having taught a wide spectrum of ages as a teacher, as you have when this exposure of a child to their grandparent or an older adult should ideally begin.

Well, ideally it should begin at birth as soon as that child is born. I think that that's something that you share is a, you know, the enriching family experience.

But in the school system, I think grade we found that grade 5, 6. So kids that are from 9 to 12 years old are very open. I mean they're very capable.

So you know, you, they, if there was an emergency with an older person, they'd know what to do. But they're still kind of very playful, right.

And they have that opportunity to, to just kind of take things as they go and not have great expectations that it's going to be, you know, a great end product, but rather just spending the time with somebody. So that's some of the most successful programs across the country have been in that age group from 9 to 12.

You kind of alluded to it off the top of the interview. But I would like to ask you for, you know, for viewers and listeners who may not be aware, how would you define intergenerational immersion?

Yeah, well, that, the middle school project that I mentioned that was intergen, what we called intergenerational immersion. So we were on a daily basis in with older people all day for everything.

The kids ate their lunches with the seniors, they had their tea times, they had their walkabouts, they had their reading times, their music times. We shared everything. I had, naively, I guess I had thought that I could actually start that right across Canada in several centers.

But it is, as you mentioned before, it's a bit of risk taking. Right. So the youngest teachers didn't want to do it because they were afraid there'd be discipline problems.

The middle teachers, the middle aged teachers didn't want to do it because they said I have never had experience with seniors, I wouldn't even know what to do. And the older teachers in the system said, nope, not me. I don't want to see where I'm going, so I don't want to be around really old people.

So it was really tough. So we backed it up. On our website, you can see there's baby steps and mama steps and then immersion. And so with the baby steps, it's that one off.

It's, you know, when a class or a group of kids from Boys and Girls Club or whatever come to a group of seniors and share a snack for. On a holiday day, for example, or, or share a planting activity or whatever. So it's kind of a one off the mama steps we had.

The one I like to mention is a hockey coach in Kelowna in B.C.

had a practice every day at five and so he got his students to come, his players to come an hour early, and they went to a care home and played cards and board games with the seniors. But what happened as a result of that? And he came every week for a couple of months during hockey season.

The seniors then became very interested in the kids playing hockey and they started going to the hockey games, getting the bus to drop them, and. And there was just that whole thing that was generated between. A friendship was generated between the two of them.

So, yeah, immersion, sort of a really very specific thing. And then mama steps and baby steps kind of back you up so that you can get your feet wet.

Statistics show that seniors are the fastest growing segment of the population in Canada, currently comprising about 20% of the population and continuing to grow, expected to grow well over 25% in the next couple of decades.

Do you believe on any level, Sharon, where we are in Canada and where we are going in the medium and the short term with these statistics, that your time has come in terms of what you are, what intergenerational society is all about?

I think so. I think so. I felt like a salmon battling my way up the river for the last, you know, 20 years. I think it really has.

And I think one of the things that's really important to me too, we talk about grandparents or grandkids, but, you know, most of my work has just been done with older people and younger people. So the fact that some grandparents are living in a foreign country or living in a country that's on another continent, it's.

They're not necessarily able to. To come to Canada, see their grandkids. And it's very expensive, obviously, to take your kids to those places to visit grandparents.

So I, I think a lot of us have to opt in to be other kids grandparents, and other kids have to opt in to be our grandchildren. So the thing that I think is really important too is that aging affects everybody.

It doesn't matter what, what gender you are, what socioeconomic system you're invol. It doesn't really make any difference because we all age from the moment we're born. We're on that same track.

And so I think that it's the one thing from my point of view and my organization's point of view that we all have totally in common, and you can't argue that. And so what a wonderful place to start by sharing the challenges that you might have at your age or your stage in your life.

Absolutely. Now you've got three sons and six grandsons.

And, you know, with respect to sharing and role modeling and those kinds of things, what did you do or what are you currently doing to foster the, you know, this kind of appreciation for elder adults among your own family members?

Well, my family, I'm. I'm really. I guess because I've always lived with older people in my life, then my kids kind of grew up to know them before they passed away.

And so it's kind of. That's how we are. And I think the one thing that I would really, really like to say about this, though, is I'm very fortunate.

Like, right now, all six of my grandsons are doing paintings, and they're all painting trees. And I've got the facility that I can. Can do something like that. But, you know, the best time is when I walk them home from school.

I can't believe the conversations we have just about things we see or something. And so often older people will say to young people, how was it? How was school today? Or, how are you doing? Well, the kids say nothing.

And you think, well, that's a dead end.

So I think when you do something like you say, let's go for a little walk, or, let's play cards, let's look at this photo album, or, here's a book that we can look at. It just gives an opportunity. It gives grounds for discussion. And I think I. I grab at every one of those opportunities with my family and.

And, you know, I mean, my grandkids will say, gee whiz, Graham, your skin is really thin and it's stretchy. How come I can pull? And what's that varicose vein doing in your foot? Well, I have one of those when I grew up.

But all of those things, things, when you stop and talk with kids about it, it dispels the fear of aging because they know you're still. You're happy, but maybe you've got a pain here.

But they just fell in the playground, and they've got a pain in their knee, too, so they can, you know, they can identify with that.

So I think it's really important to just look to other generations within your community, your next door neighbor within your whatever kind of group that you are with and say you know this is really important because it's so much of what's happening in Canada.

I think you'll have seniors and young, young people in a class or in a room or in a at an event together but we don't realize what the power of that is. So we have to be intentional. We have to say this is really important that we have these older people and these younger people together.

What can you share? What can you do together? What do you want to find as a common ground?

And all of my students they said those people we worked with were not seniors, they were our friends. And that's to me is really the critical piece.

What a powerful note to leave on Sharon McKenzie, founder of Eye to Eye Intergenerational Society. Really appreciate your insight and perspective today. Thank you so much.

Thank you.