Don’t underestimate the value of intergenerational relationships [PODCAST]

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“With the rapid growth of modern medicine and awareness in lifestyle and environmental influences, individuals can live longer and healthier lives. Approximately 15.2 percent of the U.S. population consists of individuals 65 years and older. To make the added years of life expectancy fulfilling, older adults need to stay socially connected and involved. One key method is through the development of meaningful relationships. Through the intergenerational paradigm, researchers have recognized a mutually beneficial relationship for both older and younger generations.

The focus on relationships between the young and the old has been centered around the historical and cultural bond. Traditionally, family dynamics were structured to allow elders to share their wisdom and experiences with the younger generations while also establishing the family’s norms and values. However, the social and economic changes have led to family structures to be transformed from single units to more complex and involved relationships. With the different family dynamics of single-working parents and two-working parents, there has been an increase in job opportunities. For this reason, many families move to newer cities and areas where there is higher job availability to support the family’s financial needs. These changes have separated the two generations and have left them both missing key relationships of life that can improve their overall well-being.”

Satya Moolani is a premedical student.

He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “The value of intergenerational relationships.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show we have Satya Moolani. He’s a pre-medical student. He wrote the KevinMD article “The value of intergenerational relationships.” Satya, welcome to the show.

Satya Moolani: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’re getting into the article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and your journey to where you are today?

Satya Moolani: For sure. So I was raised in a small town in Kentucky, where being a minority in a primarily white town brought its own challenges for me. I was always questioning whether I fit in with my peers, who are socially, culturally, and in all aspects different than me. So I was always on a cross path: Do I follow my friends, who do the normal stuff, like play around, don’t really study, hang out with each other? Or do I make my own pathway, where I go out of the norm and push myself to do more and learn more?

I eventually chose the second option, because I knew I’d never be satisfied following my friends, who did their own thing and didn’t really strive to do more. I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and excel in my own interests at that time. So this happened all the way until my second year of high school, when I applied to a competitive mathematics and science academy in Kentucky, where I was eventually accepted, and I wanted to further pursue my interest in biology.

I’ve always been interested in, I’d say, the medical field, or the health care sector in general, because my father is a physician, and my grandfather is also a physician. So I’ve always been surrounded by my dad talking to nurses and doctors about health problems, and I’ve always been intrigued by him saying hypertension or diabetes. What do these actually mean? So I always wanted to further learn what those meant.

At my science academy, I was surrounded by highly motivated and some of the smartest students in the state of Kentucky, and they just pushed me and motivated me to push myself further and discover what the science actually means. So I joined a neurobiology lab there, where I was able to further my interest. From there, I applied to Case Western, and that’s where I currently am. I’m a second-year pre-medical student majoring in cognitive science there.

Kevin Pho: Wonderful. And what are some of the challenges that pre-medical students face today?

Satya Moolani: There’s a few that stand out to me especially. I think one is understanding pre-medicine, or understanding what medical school is before you go into it. So we’re taking these general biology, chemistry, and physics courses, but many students feel like these are unnecessary, or they don’t really help you build up to what you cover in medical school. But I would disagree, just because the foundations that these courses lay are so important, especially when you don’t know much as a student. These courses really lay the foundation, so when you’re in med school studying these very intricate and deep concepts, these courses have really laid the foundation that you need to know those.

Kevin Pho: All right. Well, best wishes at the start of your medical education journey.

Satya Moolani: Thank you. Thank you.

Kevin Pho: So let’s get into your KevinMD article, “The value of intergenerational relationships.” Now, for those who haven’t read that article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Satya Moolani: For sure. So my article discusses the many reasons why intergenerational relationships are important and why they are actually slowly being diminished in today’s world. Traditionally, family dynamics were structured to allow the elders to share their wisdom and experiences with the younger generations, and this helps establish the family norms and values. However, due to the changing social and economic lifestyles, these family structures have slowly dissolved. Families are slowly moving into urban settings, and grandparents don’t want to follow these settings. They like to live in the country and live on their ranch-style houses. So this is causing a rather large disconnection between the younger and older generations, which have traditionally been shown to have a beneficial bond.

However, there are intergenerational programs that strive to close this gap. The key to a successful intergenerational model is to build a mutual, meaningful relationship between the generations, in which both generations feel like they have something to contribute and gain from their relationship, where social growth and learning can be fostered. Through intergenerational programs, not only are older adults gaining a sense of companionship and someone to share their knowledge and experiences with, but the youth are also gaining the guidance and encouragement they need to shine in a rapidly excelling world.

So my article really stemmed from my involvement in a nonprofit organization, actually, called Create Circles. Create Circles is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to helping older adults in long-term care communities rediscover purpose through our volunteer program. Our mission is to redefine the narrative around aging by promoting goal-oriented projects between volunteers, who are usually students, and older adults.

While loneliness in nursing homes has been a long-standing issue, it has been greatly heightened right now by this pandemic. This loneliness has had great medical consequences and quality-of-life implications for individuals who already are marginalized by our society. So since our founding 18 months ago, Create Circles has collaborated with over 25 long-term care communities, and we have trained over 375 volunteers to create these meaningful bonds that older adults now have in these nursing home facilities.

Kevin Pho: So you talk about how the generations, the old and the young, are getting further apart for a variety of reasons that you listed. What are some actionable ways that the younger generation can still stay connected with their grandparents?

Satya Moolani: Yeah. So one problem I really notice is that our generation, especially my generation, we are always hooked to our phones. We have Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. We are always on our phones looking at these posts by our friends. However, I feel like that kind of world is so disconnected from the actual world. The actual world is known as a social world, where we’re interacting with individuals face to face. However, COVID-19 really has disassociated that.

However, with innovation, with Zoom and FaceTime and Skype, you’re able to contact people from all over the world and actually talk to them face to face. So I think students, young adults, anybody should contact their grandparents, or older adults that they were usually close with, and just be like, “Hey,” send them a link, be like, “This is how you can talk to me. I’d love to talk about your experiences in the past, what you did when you were younger. What was your job? How do you feel now? How is it different than when you were younger?” These types of questions can really engage an older adult, and it helps them reminisce on their older memories. And that is just a beautiful bond that you can create like that.

Kevin Pho: And speaking from the perspective of the younger generation, talk about some of the pluses in terms of connecting with your grandparents. What are some typical scenarios and some typical stories that you’ve heard, either from yourself or from your peers?

Satya Moolani: Building this relationship with your grandparents is very important, just because your grandparents have gone through 60, 70 years of their life. The amount of experiences that they’ve had is actually insurmountable. You, compared to them, are like one-sixth, I would say, right? And they can basically act as a mentor to you, just because they have had the experiences. They’ve had the hardships, they’ve had the happiest moments in their life. They know when you should be feeling, if there’s a small win in your life, you should be really happy about that, just because there will be something that happens negatively in your life, and you’re going to be really down about that.

So building these relationships, where the grandfather or grandmother can act as a mentor, is really important, just because I think mentorship right now in the U.S. is not really prevalent. Students are basically relying on whether it’s their colleges or their parents, and being like, “Hey, how do I do this?” But your grandparents are the ones who have gone through all of this, whether it be in a different time or a different area. That really doesn’t matter, just because the experiences will still be the same; they just come at you in different ways.

Kevin Pho: Now, we are of course in the midst of a pandemic. We’re speaking a week before Thanksgiving, and it just exacerbates that schism between generations. So hopefully, once the pandemic ends, what do you envision that connection to be? Do you envision it to go back to the way things were, or is this going to be a permanent rift that we’ll have to find some way to bridge?

Satya Moolani: Yeah. So luckily, with the pandemic, older adults are on the cusp of death, just because this pandemic, COVID-19, really just attacks their immune system. But with that, the light is now on older adults and nursing homes, and how they are implementing their new strategies so that a similar pandemic won’t occur again. So I think that because of that, a lot of people are looking into innovations in nursing homes and older care: How do we improve these types of situations so that they never occur again?

And with that, I think with this intergenerational relationship, where social isolation is happening, it’s very prevalent in these older adults, and I think there are programs like these that are going to come out, like Create Circles, where we’re really trying to connect the average college student who hasn’t had that meaningful bond with their grandparent. They can do that with us, where they can connect with an older adult from St. Louis, Missouri, and he was an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War, and he has all these stories about how he went through the hardships to become a pilot, and what it was like in Vietnam when he was a pilot. There are so many stories like that.

Our volunteer and adult pairs work on so many different projects. One project was that a volunteer made a whole cookbook. It was like a 90-page cookbook of all of the older adult’s favorite recipes, and I went through each one of those recipes, and I was like, “Man, this is actually incredible,” the amount of effort that this volunteer put in, and to collaborate with an older adult who had such a wide array of recipes just in her brain. Because she’s in a nursing home, she’s not really doing anything, but she was able to actually say every single recipe, and then the volunteer was able to go on software and make a cookbook. It was actually incredible. So these are the types of projects, the types of relationships, we really want to emphasize, and they’re so important.

Kevin Pho: And if I was an older adult and I wanted to be involved, whether it’s in your program or similar programs, how would I go about doing that?

Satya Moolani: Yeah. So I think currently there’s a gap with older adults, and they don’t really have the knowledge of how to use technology. However, I think if you can connect with your child, your grandchild, who has that innovation, who knows how to use their phone, how to search the web, there’s so many different ways you can get involved in these types of things. So at Create Circles, we basically have a form on our website, at createcircles.org, where you just fill it out, and we will pair you in about a week with a student across the U.S. who has similar passions to you, so that you can really align and create that meaningful bond. And I think older adults should sign up for these types of programs, just because they have so much knowledge that these students would love to hear and be mentored under. That’s the bond that we’re trying to create.

Kevin Pho: And if I was a student and also wanted to be involved with your program to connect with older adults, what type of specific student are you looking for? Is there a specific age range? So tell me a little about the type of student you are looking for for your program.

Satya Moolani: We basically are looking for students from the age of 16 upwards, just because we want to have a student that understands how to interact with the older adult. We have to be selective in these types of things, because if we select a student that is immature or says something wrong, that can really affect the older adult’s mental health. We have to be really sure that we don’t have that problem. So we have this whole training process, where a student goes through a training process, they take a quiz, and we then interview the student, just to be sure that we’ve gone through all the necessary steps to ensure that a student won’t create a big problem like that.

And then currently we’re starting this chapter program. I’m basically leading a chapter program in Cleveland to basically get students from Case Western University, where I’m a student, and we are reaching out to nursing homes in Cleveland, where we can say, “Oh, we have students in Cleveland. We have about 25 volunteers ready to sign up.”

However, a challenge that we’re having is that these nursing homes are trying to connect their families with their older adults, and we’re kind of on the back burner, just because the importance is family-older adult. We, however, can provide a relationship that the family doesn’t provide. The family knows basically almost everything about the older adult. However, when we pair a student with an older adult, they don’t know anything about them. So when a student asks, “Oh, what did you do when you were younger?” the older adult has to think about, “Oh, I was an accountant for this firm, and I did this, this, and this.” So that helps them reminisce on their old memories. It’s spreading activation; their neurons start to connect with each other. And that’s basically the bond we’re trying to go for.

Kevin Pho: And how often would your students connect with the older adults? Can you comment on the longitudinal relationship of your program?

Satya Moolani: Yeah. So basically our program is an eight-week relationship, where two to three times a week, the older adult and the student meet for basically about 30 minutes to an hour. Sometimes visitations are up to two hours long; we just let it happen however long they want to talk with the older adult. In that eight-week program, we start out building a rapport between a student and an older adult, and then after a certain time, when you think you know a lot about the older adult, you want to start building a project around it.

So I talked about the cookbook. Other people create collages of the older adult’s life. They talk about the story of their life, and they write about it, like a two-, three-, four-page book about them. So after eight weeks, we then come back, we talk to the student, and we ask, “OK, do you think you want to continue talking to this older adult, or do you think you want to get paired with a new older adult?” just because eight weeks is a long time to talk to somebody. And if you think you want to continue building that relationship, then go for it. We’re all down for that.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Satya Moolani. He is a pre-medical student. He wrote the KevinMD article “The value of intergenerational relationships.” Satya, what is your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Satya Moolani: One thing that I’d like to close out with is that times are changing, and people are forgetting the old and elderly. I really am in contact with my grandparents. However, with these changing times, we can’t forget these individuals who are in the last third of their lives. Their experiences, their hardships, their happiest moments, these need to be shared, because this is life, this is life in the end. All of these stories will die off when an older adult passes away, and a great way to re-establish these connections can be through intergenerational programs, just like Create Circles.

Kevin Pho: Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Satya Moolani: Thank you so much.

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