Conversations with people much older or younger

Conversations across a forty-year gap are frequently stilted, and it is rarely because the two people have nothing in common.

What actually goes wrong

The identifiable causes.

Assuming shared references that are not shared, in either direction.

Adjusting your speech based on age rather than on the person, which is detected immediately.

Treating the other person as a representative of their generation rather than as themselves.

Asking the standard questions — about retirement, about studies — which produce the standard answers.

And an assumption of difference that becomes self-fulfilling.

Patronising speech

The most damaging pattern.

Speaking more slowly, more loudly, more simply, or with exaggerated warmth to an older person is a well-documented phenomenon, and it is consistently reported as demeaning by those receiving it.

It also has practical effects: it reduces what is communicated and it discourages participation.

The equivalent towards younger people — explaining things they already know, assuming inexperience — has the same effect.

The fix is straightforward: speak to the person as you would to anyone, and adjust only when there is a reason specific to them.

Hearing rather than age

A distinction worth making.

Where someone genuinely has difficulty hearing, the useful adjustments are: facing them, reducing background noise, speaking clearly rather than loudly, and rephrasing rather than repeating.

Which are adjustments for hearing, not for age.

And they should be made because they are needed rather than because of an assumption.

Questions that work

Instead of the standard ones.

To an older person: what did you do before this, what changed most in your field, what do people get wrong about that period, what are you doing now that you did not expect to be.

To a younger person: what are you working on, what do you think about X, what is the thing older people misunderstand.

In both directions: what are you interested in at the moment.

Which are questions about the person rather than about their stage of life.

Asking about the past

Well rather than badly.

Specific questions produce specific answers: not "what was it like then" but "what was your first job, and what did it pay".

Asking about ordinary life rather than about historical events.

Asking about what they thought at the time rather than what they think now.

Following the detail rather than moving on to the next era.

And not treating it as a documentary exercise, which people notice.

Being asked about the future

The younger side of the same problem.

Younger people are asked about plans constantly and about opinions rarely.

Which means asking what they think about something substantive produces a considerably better conversation than asking what they intend to do.

And treating their view as a view rather than as a data point about their generation.

Where the gap is real

Not pretending otherwise.

References, technology and the shape of working life genuinely differ, and pretending they do not produces its own awkwardness.

Which means asking rather than assuming: "I do not know what that is — tell me" is a good sentence in both directions.

And treating the difference as interesting rather than as a barrier, which is generally how it is experienced by whoever is explaining.

At work

Where it has consequences.

Assumptions about capability based on age operate in both directions and are frequently wrong.

Which means: ask what someone's experience actually is rather than inferring it; explain things once and check rather than assuming knowledge or its absence; and give feedback in the same terms regardless of age.

And mixed-age pairs frequently work well precisely because they are not competing for the same position.

Family conversations

The hardest case.

Established roles persist long after they have stopped being accurate, which is why adults revert around their parents.

What helps: asking about parts of their life you were not present for, which breaks the role; meeting somewhere other than the family home; and asking questions you have never asked, which is usually most of them.

And doing it while it is possible, since the questions people regret are almost always the ones they did not ask.

The general principle

Which covers most of it.

Almost every failure in these conversations comes from responding to a category rather than to a person.

Which means the correction is the same one that improves conversation generally: be curious about the specific individual in front of you, and let the rest follow.