Mary Balsley had just stepped into a local elementary school class to read a Dr. Seuss book when she realized she had entered a world much different from her own at Plymouth Village in Redlands, Calif.
All the faces in the audience were painted with Cat-in-the-Hat whiskers.
“Well, I can’t read in this room,” she announced to the surprised youngsters at Highland Grove Elementary School. “I don’t have any whiskers.”
To the children’s delight, the teacher promptly painted whiskers on their visitor’s face.
“They were just hilarious,” Balsley, president of the resident association at Plymouth Village, recalls of the students’ reaction. “You try to get at their level and have fun.”
Schoolchildren and seniors live on opposite ends of the aging spectrum. But at ABHOW’s senior living communities, the ends are coming together with remarkable benefits for the young and the young at heart.
Intergenerational programs are closing the aging gap, an all-too-common distance in modern society that leaves children without a connection to their grandparents’ generation and deprives seniors of the chance to share their life experience and pass on their stories.
Jeff Glaze, chief operations manager for ABHOW’s continuing care retirement communities, says the company is keen on intergenerational programs because they so clearly help residents age successfully.
“Our goal is to make sure our residents maintain meaning and purpose in their lives, and one of the best ways to do that is to provide them with opportunities to connect with younger generations,” says Glaze.
At ABHOW’s 11 CCRCs, generations come together in a number of ways, from pen pal programs to musical collaborations to civic volunteer projects. Seniors at one community even invited a local youth group to introduce them to high-tech robotics.
The company’s affordable housing communities are getting in on the action, too, often by hosting local school and civic group meetings. Residents at Tahoe Senior Plaza in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., have become patrons of sorts to a local girls’ karate club.
At the CCRCs, intergenerational programs are a complement to Masterpiece Living, an initiative for successful aging that focuses on the four dimensions of a well-balanced life – social, physical, intellectual and spiritual. A happy encounter with children can touch all four at once.
Vera Peery, a resident member of Plymouth Village’s intergenerational choir, says the programs have a positive effect.
“Getting involved with the children is a wonderful thing,” she says. “In a way, it keeps us young.”
Peery says the choir is a chance to keep singing, something she’s loved to do since she was about the age of the Highland Grove youngsters who sing alongside her.
“I’m 85 and I’m still able to warble a little bit,” she says.
Maddie Montano, a rising fifth-grader and choir member, says for her, the talent of the resident singers was a revelation.
“I was really surprised because I didn’t know that they could sing really well,” she says. “They are really good.”
One of the choir’s favorite songs to perform is, perhaps fittingly, the “Peter Pan” tune “I Won’t Grow Up.”
The need for this togetherness, aging experts agree, stems from changes in modern-day lifestyles. Daily interaction between generations was common when extended families lived together or close by in towns and villages. But the link largely dissolved as improved transportation and communications created a more mobile population. Today, grandparents and grandchildren are often separated by great distance. The divide deepens when seniors move into communities reserved for retirees.
The separation of children and seniors is costly. Children go without the wisdom and gentleness of their elders and seniors miss the curiosity and affection of the young.
It need not be that way, according to Glaze. Intergenerational programs can’t close the gap between family generations, he says, but they can bridge stages of life. Better still, they can help keep seniors from feeling as if society no longer values them.
“We’re very intentional at ABHOW about creating opportunities for them to share their stories, and successful aging means you keep growing and learning new things as you age,” he says. “Our residents receive as much from the kids, I’m sure, as the kids do from them.”
Intergenerational programs have one goal in common – to connect – but a growing variety of ways to do it. Allowing each community to capitalize on its own strengths and creativity in developing these programs, ABHOW believes, is far better for residents than a corporate, cookie-cutter approach would be.
“It’s amazing what you see bubble up at each community if, as a company, you say, ‘Here’s the goal, now go do it in a way that makes sense for you,’” says Glaze. “We leave it to our team members to meet corporate objectives in a way that creates uniqueness at each community.”
The creativity and ingenuity of ABHOW’s intergenerational programs often draw the attention of others in the senior living industry.
“It’s flattering when others begin looking at what you’re doing,” says Cathy Jensen, director of resident activities and lifestyle at The Terraces at Los Altos in Los Altos, Calif. “That’s probably when you know you are on to something.”
One of the more innovative things Jensen has done at the community is to have local teens come in and speak to residents as a way to fulfill their public speaking requirements for high school. And recently, Jensen worked with Stanford University students to record the life stories of women residents for an oral history project.
Other examples abound. At Grand Lake Gardens in Oakland, Calif., a Baptist youth group plays board games with residents, and the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra comes in regularly to play classical music. At Piedmont Gardens, also in Oakland, residents meet with students of all ages from various schools for parties, events, classes, workshops, and holiday celebrations. At Mount Rubidoux Manor, an affordable senior housing community in Riverside, Calif., seniors work with local schoolchildren to raise awareness about environmental issues.
How seniors and children benefit from such contact is as obvious as a smile, says Jensen. She remembers the comments of two third grade girls as she took them to meet the seniors with whom they had corresponded in a pen pal program.
“The girls said, ‘This is the most exciting day of my life.’ I almost had to stop and ask, ‘What did you say?,’” Jensen recalls.
Plymouth Village is especially enterprising, perhaps due to the community’s unusual generational connection in leadership.
Julie Michaels’ father was a former executive director at Plymouth Village. She later held the same post before leaving to raise her young family. Later, she returned to work as a reading teacher at Highland Grove Elementary School. Her mother is Mary Balsley, who read the Dr. Seuss stories. All those connections have led to an unusually strong link between the community and the school.
Intergenerational programs are more than an activity, Michaels says. At her school, where more than half the students qualify for a free or reduced lunch and many are studying English as a second language, Michaels says a visit from a resident can mean a lot.
“I watch and oftentimes it’s those children who gravitate over to the residents,” says Michaels. “They need that hug and just to know they are cared for.”
At times the connection between seniors and children at the school can be profound, particularly in special needs classes. Some of the residents use wheelchairs and walkers. So do some of the children.
Peery remembers going to read to one of the classes.
“I just thought, how am I going to get across to these children? I was so taken aback when I saw them. Some couldn’t speak. Some couldn’t see. But they all could hear,” she says.
So Peery read to them across the generations and across so much else.
“I was absolutely blown away by the response that I got,” she says. “The smiles, the clapping, the laughter was just very special. I hope I was able to bring a little bit of change into their life. I’m looking forward to going back. It really touched me.”
About ABHOW:
Founded in 1949, ABHOW is widely known for its pioneering leadership in senior housing and health care. The company serves more than 5,000 residents in 37 retirement communities in California, Arizona, Nevada and Washington.
To learn more about ABHOW visit www.abhow.com.
This article appeared in the July 2011 issue of ABHOW Words
