It has been said they can get away with murder because of their ages. It has been said they get bored with all of their free time. And it has been said they get tired of 30- to 40- to 50-year-olds telling them what to do all the time.
The ”they” in question here are children, teens and senior citizens. Jody and Grandpa if you will. Unfortunately, though, all Jodys and grandpas don`t have a good rapport.
There seems to be this stigma attached to stiff joints, gray hair and wrinkles: slow and stuck in the past.
It`s an unfair stereotype, of course, but if it fits Grandpa, so what.
On the other hand, Grandpa has a lot of interesting stories to tell. And if Jody ignores him, they both lose.
Cecelia Sanders, associate director of Senior Services Associates, an agency serving the older people of Kane, Kendall and McHenry Counties, has had success in bringing Yorkville`s youngsters and oldsters together via intergenerational programs.
The programs have worked so well that she has targeted Aurora, Geneva, St. Charles and Batavia for similar programs.
Sanders used Yorkville students and senior citizens who hang out at the Beecher Community Building and Senior Center to kick off the program in 1987. At Circle Center Elementary School, for example, seniors were invited to demonstrate crafts, talk about school in the ”olden days” and show antiques. Yorkville High School held a Senior Citizen Day where seven seniors met students for breakfast and attended classes together.
And Parkview Elementary School has brought children and seniors together through pen-pal projects.
Debi Harding, a 4th-grade teacher at Parkview, had her first experience with an intergenerational program last year when she invited a panel of seniors to speak to her class before Thanksgiving.
The seniors talked about what Thanksgiving was like during the Depression. It was the first time a lot of her students had ever heard of the Depression. And because Parkview is 102 years old, many of the panelists had gone to school there.
”My students were fascinated to hear what it was like to go to school here during the war,” she said.
This last school year, Harding decided to use the pen-pal project as a teaching aid for penmanship. ”Textbooks are only one tool,” she said.
”Sometimes, a minor tool. Letter writing was real, and my students met new friends through it.
”The kids would write to 80-year-olds about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the seniors-some wrote pages and pages-would write about themselves.”
The letters went back and forth two or three times with Harding giving her students` letters to Sanders, Sanders distributing the letters to the seniors at Beecher and Sanders giving senior response letters to Harding.
”When the letters came back, we sat down and shared them,” Harding said. When the last letters were read, Harding`s class made a lunch date with their senior pen pals. They met at Beecher for hot dogs and found one another by looking at name tags. Then they presented one another with small gifts.
It was slow going at first, but after a while, the 4th graders and seniors were yacking up a storm.
Mary Flair, 72, one of the seniors who participated, couldn`t get over how well mannered the students were.
”I was especially struck by how nice the boys were,” she said. ”We had some real good conversations.”
Other teachers at Parkview have used the pen-pal program as well. Natalie Gray, now 12, said she wrote to a senior pen pal two years ago while she was in the 5th grade. As it turns out, Natalie and 78-year-old Wilma McIntosh still keep in touch. Both were sitting at a lunch table at Beecher when Natalie mentioned that McIntosh comes to see her cheerlead and has visited her home several times.
”In the beginning, we talked about when I was a child,” McIntosh said.
”I lived on a farm in Iowa and went to a country school where one teacher taught 1st through 8th grade in one room. So our childhoods are considerably different. But in the summertime, when there was no school, kids used to break into the school and throw parties and break things up. That sounds like today,” she said and smiled at Natalie.
Another program at Circle Center helped demonstrate the physical effects of old age when a group of students became old for about 1/2 hours.
The students smeared Vaseline on their glasses, put cotton in their ears, taped several fingers together and put dried peas in their shoes. Then they went to McDonalds with four genuine senior citizens for lunch.
At McDonalds, the students had to help one another see prices and handle money, and they found it difficult to eat with fingers that didn`t function very well. But they saw one advantage to being old: They got a free soft drink as a senior citizen`s discount.
Nathan Amentz, 12, was one of those students. ”I had dried peas in my shoes, my fingers tied together and cotton in my ears,” he said. ”My mom didn`t want me to put Vaseline on my glasses because she said they might get scratched.”
Nathan said the ailments-of-the-elderly exercise allowed him to identify with what it`s like to be old-sort of.
”I knew I could just take the stuff off,” he said. ”So it gave me a little bit of a feel for what it`s like, but not totally.”
Barb Johnson, a counselor at Circle Center who taught Nathan`s class, has also placed a senior in the role of counselor. She is currently looking into using more seniors in this capacity.
”I had one woman work with a 6th-grade girl who has a bad family life,” Johnson said. ”She`s the kind of kid who needed someone to say `You look really nice today` and to care about her. We pulled the child out of her classes one afternoon a week and the woman would help her with her homework. It was like Grandma was coming to help, and the kid wanted to see her every day.”
On the flip-side is 80-year-old Grace Palmer. It was she who received an education by participating in Senior Citizen Day at Yorkville High School.
On her itinerary was a health class, a class she found to be an eyeopener.
”The kids know more now than I did when I got married,” she said.
”They talk about things so freely, like menstrual periods and cycles and when women can`t get pregnant. They talked like they were husband and wife. I grew up straight-laced. It was very revealing.”
Sanders` experience with her own grandmother is part of what prompted her early interest in intergenerational programs.
”I always enjoyed going to my grandmother`s,” Sanders said. ”My kids don`t get to see their grandparents as much as I used to, and I feel bad about that. Then I went to an intergenerational conference and got excited about it and started a program when I got back.”
In June, Yorkville received a 1990 third-place Governor`s Hometown Award and an honorable mention for its senior involvement in intergenerational programs.
”Now I`m working with Aurora and the Tri-Cities (Batavia, St. Charles and Geneva),” Sanders continued. ”I`ve talked to several principals who are looking into starting intergenerational programs.”
In addition, Aurora is looking into developing a combination senior-child day care center and has had a youth chore service program for senior citizens since 1985.
”The kids really enjoy it,” said Jeff Scull, youth director for Aurora Township. ”We service about 150 seniors in the Aurora area each summer and mow about 125 lawns a week.”
Scull said that this is a free service for seniors and that his youth workers are paid with Job Training Partnership Act funds.
But a lot of the seniors give tips or show their gratitude in other ways. ”A couple of kids wanted to mow this one woman`s lawn all the time,”
Scull said. ”They wouldn`t say why because they were afraid other kids would want to cut in on their territory. Then we found out she was making them chicken and dumplings.”
Phyllis Klein, senior director at the Geneva Park District, said she is looking forward to having intergenerational programs set up in Geneva because not much is being done to bring seniors and young people together in this area.
Klein, who is over 60 herself, said, ”Seniors need to keep on living in order to survive. Many become bitter and lonely. But I see a lot of love out there, and intergenerational programs can help them grow and make choices in life.”
