A look behind Old People’s Home for Teenagers

ABC’s award-winning show ‘Old People’s Home for Teenagers’ brings together older Australians and teenagers, highlighting the vulnerabilities of both groups. This series follows two hit seasons of ‘Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds’, which combined seniors and preschoolers and showed that connections with young children could improve the health and happiness of older Australians. The show’s narrative is helpfully guided by health experts, including amongst others, ANZSGM member Dr Stephanie Ward who is a dementia researcher at UNSW’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) and geriatrician at Prince of Wales Hospital.  

What was the overall goal of the experiment?

To determine whether a structured intergenerational programme involving both teenagers and older adults could improve wellbeing and change attitudes for all participants.
Outcomes measured for the older adults were loneliness, quality of life, mood, gait speed, grip strength, balance, step count, and attitudes towards teenagers. 

What do older people and teenagers have in common?
The teenage years represent the very beginnings of adulthood, while for the older adults this represents the final stages of adulthood.

Both of these age groups have a high prevalence of loneliness – which in fact is higher in teens than in older adults and interestingly, after older adults, teenagers are the age group second most likely to experience “ageism” – ie, negative attitudes based on age alone.

In terms of more positive commonalities, both of these generations have a need for finding a purpose and meaning in life, and for having meaningful connections and friendships. 

What benefits were gained for both the teenagers and the older people in participating in the experiment?
For the older adults, there was a reduction across the group on the loneliness measure as well as the scores on the Geriatric Depression Scale, and an improvement in self-rated quality of life and measures of gait speed, grip strength, balance and levels of physical activity. This was consistent with the outcomes from the earlier two televised experiments that were conducted with four-year-olds. 

For the teenagers there were global improvements in all indices of well-being. 

For both generations, we saw some lovely changes in attitudes each generation had towards each other. At the beginning and end we asked each participant to say the first five words that came to mind to describe the other generation. The changes in these by the end was so impressive! I suspect (and hope!) that the experiment helped change the attitudes of the viewers too. 

What is really lovely about this experiment being filmed is that the real drivers of these measured changes were captured and shared with the public.

And what we see unfold is lovely moments of reciprocal learning from each generation, the sharing of experiences (some good, some bad) and differing perspectives that spending time with someone from a different generation can bring.

For many participants, of all ages, this clearly led to a real boost in confidence levels. Moreover, it facilitated an environment in which true connections and friendships formed. And these continue in real life!

By the end of the series many of the older people had developed strong bonds with their teenage friends, were less isolated and seemed a lot happier. How was this measured? How strong were the findings?
In this experiment we delve a lot into the area of loneliness. Loneliness is a big issue for the population that we care for in geriatric medicine. We had demonstrated benefits in mood, quality of life and frailty measures on the first two experiments, and we thought that the effect of intergenerational contact on addressing loneliness was a big contributor to achieving these benefits. So this time, we wanted to explore this concept more explicitly, especially as evidence on the adverse health effects of loneliness grows. Loneliness has been linked to increased risks of dementia, cardiovascular disease and premature mortality.   

I hadn’t appreciate how big an issue isolation and loneliness was for teens, and how that’s been compounded by the pandemic years. 

We used to UCLA Loneliness Scale V3, which is an 80 point scale. There was an average change of 4 points across the group of older participants, with 2 of the 10 participants in particular demonstrating very dramatic improvements. 

There was also a lot of “screen time” dedicated to the the teenagers and older adults speaking about the effect loneliness had on their lives. 

As a geriatrician, did the experiment teach you about better ways to address isolation and loneliness in your patients?
That’s a great question. This experiment, as well as the other two with the four year olds, has really driven home for me just how important it is to address these social factors to improve health.

I “prescribe” time with younger people (eg grandchildren and great grandchildren) when I can. I would love to be able to “prescribe” (or I guess, refer might be the better word) some of my patients to a formal, non-familial intergenerational programmes. The numbers of these programmes are increasing! 

The experiment obviously had some very positive results, has it led to further research in this area?
Most definitely. I like to describe the televised experiments as starting an important conversation, that the community is now continuing. I have had the privilege of working with A/Prof Ruth Peters from The George Institute, together with a range of researchers – including fellow geriatrician Prof Sue Kurrle – and community partners on a number of projects evaluating the real-world effects of intergenerational preschools in reducing frailty, including an NHMRC-funded randomised cluster controlled trial (Read here).

Emeritus Professor Anneke Fitzgerald at the Griffith University has been an intergenerational trailblazer in Australia and has established the  Australian Institute for Intergenerational Practice which is free to join. 

There has been a real momentum towards more research and implementation in this area across so many sectors, with councils, playgroup Australia, childcare providers and schools getting involved, and some amazingly innovative programs. 

There is still a need for more investment into research, especially around evaluating scalable models and implemenation, as well as a need for workforce training. 

You can watch the series on ABC IView here, and catch up on Series 1 and 2 here.

Image courtesy: Stephanie Ward filming Old People’s Home for Teenagers.