How Friendships With Elders Help Teens Find Purpose

Time in this high school moves without hurrying once classes are done. The afternoon sun fills the halls, almost empty of students now except for the few still packing up. In one classroom, teens and older adults begin to arrive — some ebulliently, others shyly, but all with an eagerness that feels palpable.

Gradually, their voices and laughter fill the room, as they greet each other in welcoming tones. Then, voices settle as adolescents and their older adult partners turn to each other. An expectant pause ensues, and the tenor of the room shifts as participants dial in. Deep conversations begin to emerge — slower, lower tones resonating through the space like a steady humming. It feels like life is in the making.

This scene comes from our study on adolescents’ development of transcendent thinking and purpose in an intergenerational storytelling program. We partnered with Sages & Seekers, an organization whose mission is to bring together adolescents with elders from their communities in insight-generating friendship. Adolescents, the “seekers,” share dreams about the lives they want to live, and older adults, the “sages,” share stories and lessons from the lives they have lived.

This is not a mentoring program, where one group holds more knowledge than the other. Instead, the groups learn from and benefit each other. For the seekers, the program is an opportunity to build perspective on values and beliefs that will guide their future lives. For the sages, it offers an opportunity to view the world again through the eyes of a young person — to look back on their life from a more current perspective, and to distill learning.

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.  

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. 

Transformative Conversations
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 by 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,” Michael said.

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.

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

He said in his video, “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 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.

The stories were powerful and true, such as the story of Malala Yousafzai and stories of the violence and crimes youth had witnessed themselves. 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. 

The brain scanning data revealed that when teens reflected in this way, they showed dynamic, coordinated patterns of activity and de-activity 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.

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 support and modeling for these meaningful reflections. For that, adolescents need safe spaces in which to build trusted and appropriate friendships with adults and seniors.

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 a 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.”