Zuma’s Has a Mentoring Program

			Children need 4-6 involved caring adults in their life

In The Ways of My Grandmothers, Beverly Hungry Wolf writes, “In the years since I began following the ways of my grandmothers I have come to value the teachings, stories, and daily examples of living which they shared with me.
I pity the younger girls of the future who will miss out on meeting some of these fine women.”

In many ways, mentoring has its roots in grandparenting. Grandparents, having reached a certain stage in their life, often have a strong need to create a lasting legacy. This can take shape in serving as mentors, role models, teachers, and family historians to their grandchildren. But intergenerational mentoring need not be traditional or biological. Many children don’t have actively involved, biological grandparents in their lives. These children still need an opportunity to connect with older adults. Research shows children need 4-6 involved, caring adults in their life to fully develop emotionally and socially. One of the challenges today is that children receive too much peer socialization and not enough contact with mature adults.

The award-winning bestseller Dream is narrated by a wise old star who takes the reader on a colorful journey through a lifetime. The wise old star serves as a mentor figure. At the end of the story, the star has passed on all its wisdom and it is up to the reader to move forward on their own and reach for their dreams – with the wise old star in place in the sky as a reassuring presence. A good mentoring relationship is very much like that, and many mentoring programs use the Dream book as inspiration and introduction for both young and old, and a talking tool to help young people think about their life ahead of them and their own goals.

Intergenerational mentoring can take the form of an older person informally becoming a “grandfriend” to a young person. Or it may occur as part of a more formal, structured intergenerational program. There is a valid distinction to be made between older adults simply volunteering in various capacities, engaging in a long-term mentoring relationship, and participating in an intergenerational program. But I would argue that most intergenerational contact is, at one level or another, a form of mentoring. Said one student who was being tutored in school by an older adult volunteer, “I figured that she was just going to be a tutor, but she turned out to be more like a friend. Being with her was like getting practice being an adult.”