Group Work Intervention In Negative Emotions Of The Elderly In Inter-generational Education

Due to greater pressure in economy, younger generation needs help taking care of their children from their parents more than ever. More and more children grow up in inter-generational family with grandparents. The public blames the elder spoiling kids and disabling them from self-care. As care-givers, given the limitation of elders' own abilities, the disagreement in educational concept with other family members or ineffectively dealing with teenagers' problems, the elderly would experience much more pressure and negative emotion and psychological problems. However, we pay little attention to the aspects of this kind of demand in old people. This paper discusses the practical research case targeting caregivers played by the elder in inter-generation area who suffer from negative emotions.Based on the theory of empowerment theory, 6 clients of elders who look after their grandchildren were gathered together in Q community play room as a group aiming to alleviate their stress and negative feelings. There are some reasons that lead to the increasing amount of negative emotions: contradictions between caring demands and worsen situation of body function or poor educational level, underestimation or denial of attending values,lack of personal social intercourse activity,etc.. In this paper,we would focus on two different reasons including disagreement with adult children and lack of social activities. Under the guidance of empowerment theory, in addition to making group members learn basic methods of relieving mood, the group provided different theme activities for social interaction,communication skill as well as assuring the role of caregiver to ease the negative emotions. The enhancement abilities in personal and interpersonal level make it possible for the elder to achieve self-confidence and self-efficacy and lower rate of powerlessness, which leads to the goal of relived mood and happiness.Main conclusions of this article: empowerment theory can be well applied to serve the purpose of relieve negative emotions of elderly people working as group work in social work practice; the combination of basic methods to relieve mood with intervention of causes can be more effective comprehensive in improving abilities to fight against negative emotions; group work is effective to problems in inter-generational education or negative emotions.