Freedman, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, spoke with senior staff writer Diana Schoberg about his most recent book, How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations.

 

THE ROTARIAN: What do connections across generations provide that connections within your own age group don’t?

FREEDMAN: There’s a growing appreciation of connections, in general, these days, fostered by the awareness of how profound the problem of loneliness is in America and elsewhere. People need a variety of connections — with their peers as well as across generations.

A Harvard study found that relationships are the key to happiness throughout adulthood. It shows that older people who connect with younger people are three times as likely to be happy as those who fail to do so. Why is that bond so important? One reason is that as we reach the time in our lives when there are fewer years ahead of us than behind us, it’s a great comfort to know that what we’ve learned is likely to live on in younger friends and family members.

TR: What are the benefits of these relationships for children?

FREEDMAN: On an emotional level, the needs of older and younger people fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When I started my career, I spent years working on kids’ issues. I didn’t have any background in aging or gerontology. But I was struck by how important the presence of caring adults is for the well-being of young people, particularly young people who are growing up in economic hardship.

Urie Bronfenbrenner, who was one of the great child psychologists of the 20th century and who co-founded Head Start, was asked what he had learned from decades of studying children’s development. He said that every child needs at least one adult to be irrationally crazy about them. I think he captured something fundamental. Young people need love and support from adults — not just from their own parents, but from other adults in the community. And as we get older, we also need to be irrationally crazy about young people. It’s a key source of happiness, according to research, and it’s something that we get better at as we age. The skills that are required to build and sustain relationships blossom in later life, as do emotional regulation and even the drive to connect.

TR: In your book, you write about the physical benefits of these kinds of connections, such as decreased rates of diabetes and arthritis in older people. What are some other benefits that might be surprising?

FREEDMAN: I was involved in creating Experience Corps, a national service program that recruits older people to serve in low-income elementary schools, helping kids learn to read. One of the discoveries we’ve made along the way is that this intersection between purpose and connection is incredibly important for well-being, especially as we grow older.

We found with Experience Corps that having responsibility and a place to go several days a week forces older people to be more physically active — they have to get out of their homes and to the schools. And purposeful activity, particularly with young people, involves a lot of learning. Explaining and teaching things to younger people helps keep older people’s minds active. There is now research from Johns Hopkins University that suggests being involved in programs like Experience Corps can offset some of the things that predispose people to dementia.

And then there’s our spiritual health — the idea that we’re living a life that still matters, rather than heeding signals from a society that older people should head prematurely to the sidelines.

TR: How has our ability to connect with each other been affected by the social distancing that COVID-19 has required?

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