On the Avenues of Intergenerational Communication
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/08
Melvin Lars is a fellow Good Men Project writer and Social Interest Group call listener-commentator. One topic was intergenerational communication. I wanted to garner some insight with a conversation between an older American and a younger Canadian.
We both live in North America, in different countries, and lived in different generations growing up (and continue to, of course). This is intended as a series on the subject of intergenerational conversation. Mr. Lars comes from Bossier City/Shreveport, Louisiana.
Lars earned several undergraduate and graduate degrees, is married to Ann Lars, and has a son named Ernest Lars. Here we talk about intergenerational communication.
When I asked Mr. Lars about the subject matter of intergenerational bonding, communication, and the facilitation of bonds through communication between generations, he talked about the importance, first, of listening.
Listening as the foundation to understanding, compassion, and exchange of experiences. Different generations have different experiences. In that, older generations and younger generations need to communicate with one another.
It seems like the foundation for long-term societies. Otherwise, society does not have anything other than a short-term perspective. Lars talked about one of the problems in the listening of the older generations. He talked about how they want to share wisdom and expect the wisdom to be absorbed.
However, they do this without first taking into account building that bond through listening and communicating in the first place with the younger people. I posted this to him as listening to learn rather than listening to respond to the young person.
He considers this exactly on point. Later in the conversation, I asked about some stronger points of communication or wisdom coming from the younger generation to the older generation and from the older generation to the younger generation.
Lars responded by talking about the attempts of the older guys to try to appease the younger guys. He argues that we need to delete the idea of a preconceived outcome for a conversation or dialogue. He also talked about deleting the idea that a young person has nothing to offer an older person. We also talked about the need to delete the attempts of the placation of the young people.
Lars goes on to note that placation is something people notice and do not like. At that point of understanding that they are being placated, people will shut down. He gives an analogy with Charlie Brown with the teacher going, “wa-wa-wa-wa.”
In terms of barriers to communication between adolescent men, young men, middle-aged men, and elderly men, Lars talked mainly from his own demographic of older men. He notes that older men have a tendency to put on a persona of seeming as if they have everything together. However, he describes the reality is quite different often: older men may not necessarily have it together. They may not want to take responsibility for skeletons they have in their closet or mistakes they made in the past.
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