I have always been captivated by multi-generational interaction. When I see the young and old interacting, getting to know each other, having fun, and (yes!) learning from each other, I have the desire for these informal and formal actions to spread like wildfire!
In my personal experience, I know of these interactions:
- My mother’s 90 year old neighbor walks to the local middle school (daily) to help students in the library
- My elderly friend (living in a local retirement community) takes the bus each week to read to a 3rd grader at a local school. She shares that she tries to find out about the little girl’s life/family without being too intrusive. So thoughtful. She is proud of “her” little girl.
- Our community has a “mentoring dream team” in which the local school system reaches out to retirees to go into the schools once a week to mentor “their” student.
A recent news article highlighted another formal national program, Experience Corps, that teams elementary students in low-income schools with seniors to tutor them in reading and math. It won’t come as any surprise when I share that one elderly person who serves as a mentor says the experience has “given her a renewed sense of purpose, and… helps her to feel mentally sharp.
A research study confirms that this tutoring experience “might help delay or even reverse some of the signs of aging in the brain.”
The study completed at Johns Hopkins was published recently in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.
Here’s more about the study as it relates to Experience Corps:
- The elderly female volunteers in the study were considered at high risk of cognitive impairment due to low income, low level of education and lows scores on cognition testing.
- Each volunteer went through the Experience Corps 40 hour training (including brush-up on math skills, learning to choose age-appropriate books, and using the library’s Dewey Decimal system).
- Each volunteer spent at least 15 hours a week in Grades K-3 tutoring children one-on-one or in small groups.
- After 6 months, functional MRIs of the brains of 8 volunteers showed improvement in regions of the brain involved in thinking and ability to organize multiple tasks. This represents “executive function”, a critical skill in maintaining independence in old age.
Why the positive effect of being an Experience Corps volunteer?
- It’s more than just getting out and being social.
- It requires problem-solving and working with teachers.
- It requires a routine for getting up and out in the morning, so there’s physical activity.
We can’t forget the mutual benefit to both the student and the elderly person. They get to build a friendship based on trust. One student says of her volunteer, “Miss Reed is nice. She’s kind. She helps me read and tells me what words mean if I don’t understand them. I don’t worry anymore about reading out loud.”
Source: http://healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=635874
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