What can a family reunion say about aging?

Do family reunions offer a key to how well we will deal with the health, lifestyle and economic questions brought on by aging?

That's what I found myself wondering after spending a couple hours Tuesday chatting with a dozen bright, talkative students at Long Prairie-Grey Eagle High School.

A lot of MPR News' reporting in Todd County for the Ground Level project centers on the questions of aging and how a community prepares for a rising proportion of elderly. But that doesn't mean it isn't about kids as well. People graduating from high school just as Baby Boomers hit retirement age will have a burden to bear, and how they choose to live their lives may say a lot about the quality of life elders will lead in the next few decades.

The kids' family histories ran the gamut. Three-generation farm family kids mixed with those who had arrived in Long Prairie a few years ago. Caleb King has spent nearly all his life in town, but he said his family was particularly spread out geographically and noted that relatives got together for a family reunion about every five years.

That made classmate Maria Juarez say, "We have one every weekend." Extended family members live in the neighborhood, and gatherings of aunts, uncles and cousins are a constant presence in her life.

If informal support -- provided by family members, neighbors and friends -- is crucial to aging well, then maybe the ease with which we pull off a family reunion is one measure of how easy it is to deal with the challenge of aging. The Minnesota Council on Aging estimated that 10 years ago 91 percent of all long-term care in the state was provided by family members, a percentage it expects to decline. Every drop of 1 percentage point costs the state $30 million, it estimated.

Closeness to family was on the kids' minds. This was a college-bound crew, for the most part, and brighter lights beckoned from St. Cloud, the Twin Cities and beyond. But I could see the wheels turning as they considered what that meant.

Caleb, for one, thought the odds were "pretty slim" that he would return after graduating. Jordan Reed, whose great grandparents farmed in the area, sees himself going into civil engineering or political science. "There's not a lot of opportunities here for those types of careers."

Charlie Faust is thinking about engineering, too, but said being close to family is important. "I don't want to take over the family farm, but I will," he said, if he has to.

And Viri Ledesma wants to get a college degree via the Internet so she doesn't have to leave town to do it.

Erin Roe, who sees her home town of Grey Eagle "kind of emptying out," could see the value of both leaving town and staying close to family. "I like both sides of that," she said.

Long Prairie has experienced an influx of Latino immigrants in the past decade, and it was tempting to see a cultural difference in the answers to this question. The students, in fact, declared it flat out -- Latinos tend to hold family closeness in high regard and will give that a higher priority when making life choices.

Todd County's Latino population is less than 5 percent of the county's total and it is far younger than the county as a whole. So it's pretty tough to conclude much on this score. But perhaps there were some insights to be had Tuesday in Room 115A at the high school.

The students, by the way, provided a pretty optimistic assessment of how well ethnic mixing is going.

They took note of tension in town and potentially gang-related graffiti in recent months. But Kimberly Romero thinks racism is declining as people get to know each other, and Maria chalked it up to this: "Americans are getting nicer."

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