For many of us, the holiday season is a time to relax with good food surrounded by our friends and loved ones. It is also a time when many of us become reconnected with our older family members.
However, inter-generational connections and relationships don’t just have to take place within families or during holidays and special occasions. Fostering relationships between younger and older individuals benefits everyone and is good for society in general.
Research shows that inter-generational programming provides specific benefits for both older adults and youth who participate in them. For older adults, it has positive impacts on health, well-being, reducing social isolation and improving their sense of worth. Meanwhile, younger groups benefit by learning new skills from older adults, gain greater self-esteem and wisdom as well as by seeing reductions in potentially ageist views. For example, a volunteer program in which younger volunteers spent 40 hours visiting older adults living with frailty over four months resulted in positive changes in their perceived meaning of life, their value of providing service to others and reduced ageist views.
The most obvious way for both populations to reap these benefits is to foster closer bonds between grandparents and grandchildren. However, as our society diversifies and urbanizes, families are more likely to be geographically dispersed, which makes the opportunity to develop intergenerational relationships beyond family connections even more important. Today, 30% of older Canadians are at risk of becoming socially isolated.
What is even more fascinating is that millennials rather than seniors are more likely to feel the most socially isolated at the moment in urban places like Toronto. Indeed, the recent National Institute on Ageing co-sponsored Toronto Social Capital Study demonstrated that “older adults exhibit among the highest levels of social capital of those surveyed. Older Torontonians were more likely to have a close friend in their neighbourhood, and to be satisfied with the frequency of contact with family and friends. These findings hold true for older adults who live alone or in high-rise buildings.” To better combat social isolation and to build social capital and better sustain our diverse urban ageing population, many have proposed the development of inter-generational communities.
Inter-generational communities are geographic areas that are intentionally designed to encourage exchange and interaction between members of different generations. The opportunity for older adults to be champions and mentors for younger adults can’t be ignored because the benefits to older and younger people alike are simply too great. As the Stanford Center on Longevity states “older people’s qualities and their affinity for purpose and engagement position them to make critical contributions to the lives of youth who need help the most. At the same time, such engagement fulfills older people’s desire for a sense of meaning and purpose, which in turn promotes well-being. Mutually meaningful relationships develop for both old and young.”
However, there is one important barrier to building intergenerational communities that Torontonians are all too familiar with: sky-rocketing housing prices. In Toronto, the average price of a single-family detached home is over $1 million. Toronto’s ballooning real estate market makes it difficult for younger Canadians to get into adequate housing and for older adults living on a fixed income to stay in their homes. But one Toronto project, led by the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly in partnership with the City of Toronto, represents an innovative solution to this problem.
The Toronto HomeShare Pilot Project matches students with adults aged 55 and older to provide up to seven hours of companionship and support per week in exchange for saving $400-600 in reduced rent each month. There are an estimated 5 million empty bedrooms in Ontario and two million empty bedrooms in the Greater Toronto Area, meaning many older adults are ‘over-housed’: living in more space than they need or can afford. The program aims to fill some of those empty bedrooms, while offering financial relief for students, support for older adults, and the benefits of inter-generational housing for both.
Home sharing among older adults isn’t new, and, in fact, it is becoming more popular. Furthermore, many more Canadians are starting the take note of the significant benefits of multi-generational households. Between 2001 and 2016, households with more than two generations in it grew by 37%, making it the fastest-growing type of housing in Canada, which 2.2 million Canadians now call home.
Given the immense popularity and benefits that come with fostering more inter-generational connections – whether within the same house or the same community – many more of us should consider deepening our relationships with older friends and family members, even when there aren’t holiday activities on to facilitate bringing us together.
Date modified: 2019-12-20
