The Lost Art of Intergenerational Conversation

Many people misunderstand the purpose of this Committee. They assume it applies only to migrant women or specific populations. It does not. It is for all women who are navigating change, transition, and what I would call their real beginnings—whether at the start of adulthood, mid-career

At its heart, this Committee is about something very simple: the need for honest, safe conversation with someone slightly further along the road.

There was a time when that conversation happened naturally. In my own family, knowledge passed not in lectures, but in dialogue. We read the same books across generations—but in different languages and editions.

My mother would read in German, my grandmother in French or Russian, and I would read in English. We would sit together and discuss works like The Tin Drum (Günter Grass, 1959), Antigone (Jean Anouih, 1944), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1966), or Our Town (Thornton Wilder, 1938). My father would guide me through Shakespeare or Stendhal.

We did not agree in any simple sense. That was not the point. We learned to see the same story from multiple lives lived differently. It shaped how I approached everything afterwards: not with a single answer, but with multiple perspectives. That kind of intergenerational exchange seems much rarer today.

Families are still loving. But the structure has changed. Many young women no longer grow up in close proximity to older generations who can speak openly about failure, reinvention, grief, or work. And many older women no longer have natural opportunities to pass on what they have learned in ways that feel relevant. What is often missing is not information—but interpretation.

Sometimes, a single conversation can change the way someone understands their own life.

No one tells you what it actually feels like to enter the working world. No one explains that education is not a direct pipeline into a profession, but a toolkit that only becomes meaningful through application. No one tells you that most professional success is not about theory, but about execution, timing, relationships, and resilience. And so, people arrive at adulthood highly educated, but under-conversationally prepared.

This gap matters.

Because many of the real questions people carry are not technical questions. They are human ones.

What does success actually feel like? For me, it became simple: a thoughtful team, a satisfied client, and work that people were willing to return to the next day.

How do you know when you are becoming the person you hoped to be?

In my case, it was not immediate. It came through loss—through grief, and through a period of professional transition. I learned that identity is not a fixed state. It is something revealed over time, often under pressure.

How do you survive disappointment?

Not by avoiding it. And not by reacting in anger. But by examining it—what happened, why it happened, and what might be learned without turning it into self-blame.

Grief is different again. It does not follow a straight line. It changes shape over time. It is also profoundly isolating, even when others are grieving alongside you. I once believed I could understand and manage grief intellectually. Life proved otherwise. It must be lived, not solved.

In earlier generations, such conversations were more common. Friends and family could ask difficult questions openly. There was space for uncertainty without performance.

Today, that space is often missing. Which is why intergenerational conversation matters so deeply. It is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure.

A way of helping people think more clearly about their own lives, not by giving them answers, but by offering perspective.

So, I return to the questions: Who has shaped your thinking, and who might still be waiting for a conversation with you?

Because what we often need is not advice, but a bridge—between where we are and where we are trying to go. Perhaps that is the real purpose of this Committee: not to explain women’s experience, but to restore the conversations that make experience usable.

Sometimes, a single conversation can change the way someone understands their own life.

And sometimes, that is enough to change everything that follows.

Nermin K. Ahmad
Chair Women on the Move
womenonthemove@nfbpwc.org