“Stay home, stay safe.” When it comes to the heightened vulnerability of America’s elders in the face of Covid-19, these are often wise words. But the unwritten injunction might as well be “Stay home, stay safe, and stay out of the way.”
Report after report has described the rise of ageism over the past months, but just as worrisome is the insidious implication that older people are exclusively the objects of service, helpless not helpers, anything but essential.
What a contrast to the thousands of older doctors, nurses, and health care workers who are working the front lines, many of them coming out of retirement to do so. And then there’s the nearly 80-year-old Dr. Anthony Fauci, a bastion of steadiness and clarity throughout the fight. Reminders, all of them, of older adults’ vast reservoir of experience and how desperately it’s needed today.
Nowhere is the need more dire than in the lives of America’s children. Already acquiring the moniker of Generation C (for Covid), millions of young people have had their schooling upended. Cut off from friends and relatives, too many are facing economic hardship and trauma comparable to their Depression-era predecessors. Some face heightened levels of abuse and danger at home.
In 2015, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam laid out the myriad struggles America’s children faced in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. If the widening inequalities and diminishing opportunities Putnam wrote about didn’t create an all-hands-on-deck moment five years ago, we certainly have one now as the two crises merge. The resulting storm will continue for years, perhaps decades, as this generation comes of age.
Where to turn for help? The one natural resource in this country that is both untapped and growing: older people. The ones who have no interest in staying out of the way. The ones who see the need and the chance to elevate their own generation by lifting up another.
It’s a match as old as time. Researchers in anthropology, human development, and an array of other fields have shown that the needs and assets of the generations fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Young people thrive with more caring adults in their lives. And far from being superfluous, older people possess just the skills young ones need.
As we get older, our knees may creak and our hearing might not be quite as sharp, but the skills required to form bonds with young people — such as emotional regulation and empathy — burgeon. And the impulse to connect in ways that flow down the generational chain just gets stronger.
Indeed, the Harvard Study of Adult Development shows that these bonds are a key to happiness in later life. Older people who connect with younger ones, the study shows, are three times as likely to be happy as those who fail to do so.
‘Community Grandparents’
And happiness is just the start. Other research underscores that older mentors, tutors, and “community grandparents” — unrelated but no less devoted — reap significant gains to their physical and mental health from spending time with kids. One Johns Hopkins University study found that volunteering to help children struggling to learn to read “halted and, in men, reversed declines in brain volume in regions vulnerable to dementia.”
Better health outcomes equal cost savings. And we’d save money, too, by chipping away at the loneliness epidemic, which erodes health as much as 15 cigarettes a day and costs the federal government an estimated $6.7 billion in additional Medicare spending each year.
Ultimately, the most important gain might be to our fraying social fabric. In 2019, for the first time in history, there were more people over 60 in the United States than under 18. Last year also introduced the “OK Boomer” and “OK Millennial” jabs. Not a good start to the more-old-than-young society already washing over us. And an unhappy detour, as well, given what we know about the natural connection between the two generations.
From where we sit now — with so many grandparents unable to hug their grandchildren — it might be hard to envision how older people can step up to nurture millions of other people’s kids. But crisis can be the (grand)mother of invention.
To help stop learning losses — the so-called Covid slide — caused by school shutdowns, nonprofits across the country are working hard to move tutoring and mentoring programs online. Mentor and iCouldBe have joined forces to create the Virtual Mentoring Portal, a free tool to help nonprofits move mentoring relationships online. CricketTogether has joined to expand the portal’s reach to children 12 and under.
Other efforts have always been virtual. Volunteers can train to become a counselor with the Crisis Text Line, supporting young people in crisis through text messages. Others can use UPchieve to provide math and college-planning advice to low-income high-school students. Still others can give career advice to young people on Careervillage.org. And millions will want to search for more opportunities on online portals like VolunteerMatch and the AARP’s Create the Good. A newcomer on the scene, Eldera, matches “kids and vetted elders” for stories, help with homework, “or just a friendly chat.”
Build a National Corps of Elder Volunteers
As impressive and timely as these efforts are, they aren’t sufficient to realize the full need and the opportunity for older people to help younger generations — virtually right now or in face-to-face ways once we begin moving beyond the virus.
That’s why we need more than a call to action. We need a call to innovation to develop a new generation of efforts mobilizing older people to help younger ones academically, socially, emotionally, and vocationally as they attempt to wind their way through the crisis. And through life.
What about a vast national corps of elders aimed at helping young people get off to a healthy start, read by the third grade, navigate the transition to adolescence, and find a foothold in higher education and the work force — one that might also bolster the legacy of the baby boomers in the process? This isn’t just a nice idea and a soft appeal to unify the generations. This is a necessary demand that we older people step up to save the American dream for a generation we are neglecting.
This can actually happen if leaders in philanthropy and the nonprofit world join us. Together, we can generate the resources to support promising models, then demonstrate their efficacy and impact. When the time is right, we can add partners, from government and business, to help expand these efforts. But we must act now. The time for foundations to lead is upon us.
Our generation has not done all we can for the next one. But it’s not too late to turn that around — with innovative ideas, programs and technologies, and the power of millions of people who want to stay safe but refuse to stay out of the way any longer.
Let’s come forward, roll up our sleeves, and help young people navigate the rocky road ahead.
