Hoe vriendschappen met ouderen tieners helpen betekenis en hun doel te vinden

Praten en nadenken over hun doelen, identiteit en waarden kan tieners helpen een gevoel van zingeving te ontwikkelen en zelfs hun hersenontwikkeling stimuleren.

Good Science Center Mary Helen Immordino-Yang , Rodrigo Riveros | 8 januari 2025

De tijd op deze middelbare school gaat zonder haast voorbij zodra de lessen voorbij zijn. De middagzon vult de gangen, die nu bijna leeg zijn van studenten, afgezien van de weinigen die nog aan het inpakken zijn. In een klaslokaal beginnen tieners en ouderen binnen te komen - sommigen uitbundig, anderen verlegen, maar allemaal met een gretigheid die voelbaar is. Geleidelijk vullen hun stemmen en gelach de kamer, terwijl ze elkaar begroeten met een gastvrije toon. Dan kalmeren de stemmen als adolescenten en hun oudere volwassen partners zich tot elkaar wenden. Er volgt een verwachtingsvolle stilte en de toon van de kamer verandert terwijl deelnemers inbellen. Er beginnen diepe gesprekken te ontstaan ​​- langzamere, lagere tonen die door de ruimte resoneren als een gestaag gezoem. Het voelt alsof er leven in de maak i

Deze scène komt uit onze studie naar de ontwikkeling van transcendent denken en doel bij adolescenten in een intergenerationeel vertelprogramma. We werkten samen met Sages & Seekers , een organisatie die als missie heeft om adolescenten samen te brengen met ouderen uit hun gemeenschappen in inzichtgenererende vriendschap. Adolescenten, de "zoekers", delen dromen over het leven dat ze willen leiden, en oudere volwassenen, de "wijzen", delen verhalen en lessen uit de levens die ze hebben geleefd. Dit is geen mentorprogramma, waarbij de ene groep meer kennis heeft dan de andere. In plaats daarvan leren de groepen van elkaar en profiteren ze van elkaar. Voor de zoekers is het programma een kans om perspectief op te bouwen op waarden en overtuigingen die hun toekomstige leven zullen leiden. Voor de wijzen biedt het een kans om de wereld opnieuw te bekijken door de ogen van een jongere - om terug te kijken op hun leven vanuit een actueler perspectief en om lessen te distilleren.

It’s clear from their excitement and commitment that the teens find value and enjoyment in this opportunity. At USC’s Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education, we wondered: How do they grow through this experience? How might they come to conceptualize their adult potential, trying on new identities and building narratives about the adult they would like to become? For us, this eight-week program offered a window into how teens develop capacities for meaning-making, and a way to understand how they build purpose even beyond such a program. We believe that the lessons we learned can help educators, parents, and teens themselves to appreciate and unlock the benefits of relationships, reflections, and what we are calling “transcendent thinking” for wellness, purpose, and psychological growth.

After each weekly session, we asked the teens to reflect on how they felt and on what they had learned that day, in a short video message to us.

Analyzing their thoughts, we gained insights that are at once simple and profound. As seekers reflected on the raw and deep complexities of the sages’ lived experiences, they began to extract broader lessons from their own lived experiences—grappling emotionally and cognitively with what they had witnessed and felt, and then moving beyond to generate the underlying convictions, aspirations, and identities that form the stuff of a promising transition to adulthood.

We call this process of moving beyond “transcendent thinking” because it builds from the specifics of situations and happenings, and their associated emotions, to broader considerations and curiosities that guide teens’ enduring dreams, intentions, identities, and values. It’s thinking that builds meaning beyond the concrete here and now.

Consider Michael, a 17-year-old from Los Angeles. After the first session with his elder partner, Sal, he sought to identify specific, factual circumstances that could serve as a concrete basis on which they could relate:

I found out that we have a lot of things in common. Like, we both like to sing music, a lot of the same music that’s similar tastes, and that in our lives we have had crazy females. . . . For me, it was my mom and for him it was his sister.

The commonalities Michael found created an unguarded starting point—a launchpad from which to build a friendship with Sal. And his thinking progressed from there. By the next session, Michael’s and Sal’s shared interest in the history of basketball provided just the right outlet for Michael to begin to explore how things can change over time, an early move toward transcendence:

Today we were talking about our thoughts on basketball and how it’s changed throughout the years.

As the weeks unfolded, Michael’s thinking continued to shift in subtle yet important ways. By week five, he was reflecting on broad values:

The thing I took away from my conversation with my sage was that, you know, we both think that the family is very important, and it influences our lives throughout. . . . Like what his mom says [to him when he was young], what his dad says to him and how he is as a person today. And with me, like how my mom and dad influence me to become a better person every day [and to] try and not be taken down easily.

Quite remarkably, we see that as Michael built a friendship and shared stories with Sal, he moved from basketball hoops and music tastes to exploring the intergenerational roots of his character.

Transcendent thinking develops adolescents’ sense of purpose

As Michael’s reflections demonstrate, over the weeks, participants’ transcendent thoughts moved them beyond the specifics of situations and happenings, as their reflections became more forward-looking, integrative, and aspirational. Michael decided he wanted to “become a better person every day”—a values-based, growth-oriented goal that extends indefinitely into the rest of his life. This feature of intergenerational conversations—an orientation toward values and the future— turned out to be key: The teens who showed such boundless but considered thinking tended to experience a burgeoning sense of purpose, defined as an energized sense of commitment to life goals that are personally meaningful.

And this pattern turned up across many of the seekers’ evolving narratives once we began to look. For example, another seeker, Laura, reflected in a late session of the program that her sage “has tried a lot of new things, and then she kind of just encouraged me more to try new things because you don’t want to go through life without trying things and regretting things in the future.” Or Joline, who reflected to her sage, “You mentioned going back to school when you were 41 years of age. To me, that shows persistence. It gives me the message to never give up regardless of the circumstances. It really helps me build my motivation especially when it comes to school. . . . [it] motivates me to keep pushing and working hard.”

Relationships are key

Adolescents can derive meaning from all sorts of mundane experiences on their own, but doing so requires active and patient reflection that can feel safer and be more productive in the context of a supportive intergenerational friendship.

In our program, the older adults brought hard-earned wisdom and life experience, and thoughtfully and vulnerably unpacking these with their teenage partners may have modeled for the adolescents how to engage with, relive, and reflect on their own experiences—both those already had and those yet to come. The new friends’ shared stories that challenged the teens’ assumptions and validated their personal experiences, striking a harmonic chord that resonated for the teens, and helped the teens develop a deeper understanding of themselves and their aspirations.

Judging from the tenor of the room, the eagerness of the participants, and the seriousness with which the teens explained their thoughts, this kind of reflection is deeply engaging and compelling for teens. It is also potentially critical for their development, as we explore next.

Transcendent thinking supports adolescents’ brain growth

Our current work extends these findings to show something quite extraordinary. Not only does adolescents’ transcendent thinking grow the mind—we found that it grows the brain. In an additional set of studies, another group of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse adolescents reflected on complex social stories and personal experiences first in an interview, and then while undergoing brain scans.

Een oudere vrouw en een jongere student lachend en knuffelend

Ruth and Julia, another sage and seeker pair

© Sages & Seekers

The stories they engaged with were powerful and true, such as the story of Malala Yousafzai and stories of the violence and crimes youth had themselves witnessed. Participants reported experiencing complex feelings, and as they talked in interviews and later reflected in the scanner, they grappled not only with the concrete facts of the stories, but with their broader meaning—for themselves and for the world. While they weren’t engaging in intergenerational conversations, the kinds of thinking and reflections they did were similar.

The brain scanning data revealed that when teens reflected in this way, they showed dynamic, coordinated patterns of activity and deactivity in key networks of the brain involved in emotion, executive functioning, self-processing, and reflection (in effect, a sort of neural “conversation” between brain networks for action and reflection, all the while with strong activations in regions involved in emotional feelings, self-awareness, and agency).

This was interesting, but the most striking findings revealed themselves years later. As we followed our participants over five years into young adulthood, scanning their brains a second time in the interim, we discovered that mid-adolescents with greater dispositions for transcendent thinking tended to show more brain development across the two years following the initial interview. That is, comparing teens’ brains from the first to the second scan—comparing them to themselves two years prior, not to each other—we found that youths who engaged in more transcendent thinking in the interview later grew their brains more over the next two years. This brain growth, in turn, predicted their identity development, which then predicted their life satisfaction as young adults. In the end, what this study showed is that it is not simply what teens think, but how they think, that grows their purpose and their brains over time.

In addition to these benefits, other studies of ours suggest that transcendent thinking can promote the development of adolescents’ spiritual and civic ideas, and even help protect brain development against the effects of witnessing community violence.

Implications for practice

Taken together, these studies reveal the powerful role of adolescents’ own dispositions of mind, and patterns of thought, in their healthy growth. Adolescents are naturally inclined toward, and deeply motivated by, reflecting on the values, beliefs, and identities that will support them in becoming fulfilled young adults.

When the situation is conducive, youth often engage spontaneously in the kinds of transcendent thinking that grow them both neurologically and personally. But other people can provide important supports and modeling for these meaningful reflections. For that, adolescents need safe spaces in which to build trusted and appropriate friendships with adults and elders. Through these friendships, adults can model emotionally meaningful reflections on lived experiences, and teens can be supported in constructing a values-based sense of self and a life purpose oriented toward a productive and happy future.

One of the seekers in our study said it well, in the tribute she read to her sage on the last day of the program. “Nancy gave me a goal…,” she shared, “never to limit myself to one option . . . never to stop at what is required, but to go beyond.”

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About the Authors

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Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ed.D., Fahmy and Donna Attallah Professor of Humanistic Psychology at the University of Southern California, is a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience and founding director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education.

Rodrigo Riveros, Ph.D., earned a Ph.D. in psychology from USC. His research focused on how adolescents develop value-based life goals, considering their brain development and intergenerational opportunities for reflecting on life st