The Gift Goes Both Ways: What a New Meta-Analysis Reveals About Purpose, Meaning, and Older Adult Mentors

By Jean Rhodes

The mentoring field has long understood the value of volunteer programs primarily through the lens of what young people receive. That framing is not wrong, but a new meta-analysis preprint by Boreham, O’Gorman, and Bailey (2026) offers a compelling complement to it. The study suggests that mentoring may be one of the most accessible and underutilized tools available for sustaining purpose and meaning in older adulthood, and that the benefits flowing through a mentoring relationship run genuinely in both directions.

The study is a genuinely impressive piece of scholarship. Drawing on a literature search spanning multiple databases, the authors identified 335 articles yielding 401 separate correlations between purpose or meaning in life and age, representing nearly 200,000 participants across six decades of research and multiple countries and cultural contexts (Boreham et al., 2026). The headline finding challenges a longstanding assumption rooted partly in Carol Ryff’s widely used psychological well-being scale, which leans heavily on future-oriented items and has consistently shown purpose declining with age. Boreham and colleagues find instead a small but statistically significant positive association between age and purpose across the full adult lifespan (r = .05, p < .001), holding well into older adulthood and only reversing for adults 80 and above (Boreham et al., 2026). The pattern suggests that future-focused measures may be capturing something that genuinely becomes less available to older adults, namely long-horizon goal pursuit, while missing the present-focused forms of meaning that older adults cultivate and sustain quite well. Most older adults are not on a fixed downward trajectory of meaning, and the right conditions can protect and even strengthen it.

Mentoring is exactly that kind of condition. The gerontological literature has established that generative activities, those oriented toward caring for and contributing to younger generations, are among the most reliable sources of sustained purpose in older adulthood (Erikson, 1982; Okun & Schultz, 2003). When a retired professional meets weekly with a first-generation college student, or a community volunteer shows up reliably for an adolescent who has no other stable adult in her life, that mentor is likely protecting her own sense of purpose and meaning at the same time. The evidence that mentoring benefits mentors has been building for some time. A 2025 scoping review found that mentors consistently report gains in satisfaction, skills, and a deepened sense of legacy (Perspectives of Mentors on Mentoring, 2025). A qualitative study of mentors in a youth program found that affirming connections with young people directly strengthened mentors’ own sense of hope and purpose (Rhodes et al., 2025). A study tracing the development of university mentors found that sustained mentoring strengthened social self-efficacy and fostered psychosocial growth in the adults involved, not only the young people they supported (Soucy et al., 2025). And longitudinal research on volunteering in older adults found associations with better executive function and episodic memory, with protective effects appearing to operate through increased social engagement and mental health gains (Lor et al., 2023; Michaelides et al., 2026).

The moderator findings in Boreham et al. (2026) add one more useful implication for programs. Purpose scales emphasizing present-focused meaning produced the strongest positive associations with age, while future-oriented scales performed the weakest. This connects to Carstensen’s (1995) socioemotional selectivity theory, which holds that older adults reorganize their motivations around present emotional experience rather than future achievement. Recruitment and retention materials that frame mentoring primarily as an investment in a young person’s future may resonate less with older volunteers than messaging that emphasizes what the relationship offers right now, the connection, the felt sense of being useful, the experience of mattering to someone.

One underappreciated barrier worth naming directly is ageism. Programs focused on recruiting older adult volunteers sometimes underestimate the degree to which young people arrive with internalized stereotypes about aging, viewing older adults as out of touch or simply not relevant to their lives. The good news is that these attitudes are genuinely changeable. Research consistently shows that intergenerational contact, particularly in the context of shared purposeful activity rather than one-directional instruction, reduces ageist beliefs in young people and increases positive regard for older adults (Burnes et al., 2019; Gexin et al., 2024). Programs like Experience Corps and Sages and Seekers have demonstrated that when the framing is right, young people respond warmly to older mentors, and older mentors thrive in return (County Health Rankings, 2021). The practical implication is that recruitment messaging alone is not sufficient. Programs need to do the upstream work of framing older mentors not as authority figures from another era but as people with hard-won knowledge and genuine investment in young people’s lives, which turns out to be exactly what most of them are.generations.asaging+2

Telling a prospective mentor that sustained engagement in a mentoring relationship is associated with stronger purpose, better mental health, and some protection against cognitive decline is not a distraction from the mission (Sutin et al., 2021). It is telling the truth about what good mentoring actually is, a relationship in which both people grow.

Boreham, I., O’Gorman, C., & Bailey, P. (2026). Purpose and meaning in life in older age: A correlational meta-analysis. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8930714/v1