Day care for kids and elders is a natural - Stride Ride Corp. and Lancaster Laboratories Inc.'s day care centers for both children and the elderly - includes related article

HR Magazine, Jan, 1993 by Linda Thornburg

How intergenerational care centers work for Lancaster Laboratories and Stride Rite.

Putting kids and older people together in day care has its advantages, as Stride Rite in Cambridge, Mass., and Lancaster Laboratories, in Lancaster, Pa., have proven. Both have on-site intergenerational care centers. There is a natural attraction of youngsters for elders and vice versa.

"My daughter's best friend Dewey is 94; he has to go into a nursing home now," says Carol Miller, executive vice president for human resources and administration at Lancaster Labs. Miller says employees at Lancaster reap the benefits of having the elderly near their children. The youngsters learn that people with wheelchairs or canes and wrinkled skin have much to offer, and that getting old isn't anything to be afraid of. On the whole, having children and adults interact means both groups have richer experiences.

Stride Rite, a shoe manufacturer, and Lancaster Labs, which conducts food, pharmaceutical and environmental testing, have had immensely successful on-site child-care centers. They have recently taken the plunge into providing on-site elder care. Stride Rite's elder-care program began in 1989; Lancaster Labs started its program last year. Both programs have been marketed to the community more than to employees, and neither program has elders who are relatives of employees currently in the center.

Stride Rite's facility

The impetus for Stride Rite's center began when the chairman of the board read a newspaper story about a New York family that had a child in one day-care center and an elderly adult in another across town. His suggestion that it might make sense to combine child and elder care was followed by a feasibility study and a multiyear planning period, in which Stride Rite's Karen Leibold worked with Cambridge elder services agencies and Wheelock College to look at existing programs, evaluate community need, and anticipate staffing and budgeting requirements.

"I was a skeptic at first, but little by little, as I looked at the models for intergenerational activities, it seemed that this might be doable, at least in an academic sense," Leibold says.

Eventually the government-university-corporate task force determined that Cambridge could indeed use another adult day-care center, and that an intergenerational center would work. The center was envisioned as a social day-care program where the ideal adult candidate might be an 80- to 85-year-old woman who had moved to a new city to live with her children after her husband died and was lonely in a house where both parents worked and the children were in school most of the day.

The adult part of the center is staffed by recreational therapists, gerontologists and social workers. Elders enrolled in the program must be able to feed and dress themselves. The center is separately incorporated and funding comes from the Stride Rite Charitable Foundation and from center fees.

Currently, 30 elders are enrolled, but they don't come every day. Average attendance is 20. Elders share a building with the child-care program for 55 youngsters--half of the children are from the community and half are children of employees.

"There is a great deal of informal interaction, as well as planned activities," Leibold says. "The two groups meet in the one common entrance and they eat their meals together. We've put in adjusted seating so those elders who want to eat with children can."

The 55 children interact with elders through planned activities such as reading stories or baking projects. One man at the center who doesn't speak English often paints with some of the children.

"But it's a mistake to think they are together all day long," she says. One day the two-year-olds will have planned activities that those elders who wish can join; the next day three-year-olds, and the next day four-year-olds. Some elders won't participate; it just depends on the individual's needs.

"It's a tremendous benefit to have the kids around. Elders need to be needed and valued, and kids learn that when they reach old age, they can live with value and dignity," Leibold believes.

"Because extended families aren't as close together as they've been in the past, intergenerational arrangements present some nice opportunities for both groups," says Marilyn Johnson, an educational specialist with Bright Horizons child-care services, which has some intergenerational programs. "The children get to know people who might be different from those in their immediate world, and adults react to children with a liveliness that might not have been there before."

Lancaster Labs' center

Lancaster Labs started its elder-care program to fulfill a need in the community and to provide a place for the relatives of employees. Lancaster was able to learn from studying the Stride Rite model. Lancaster's Miller says originally the company had not wanted to form a 501(c)(3) program, which gives the center nonprofit status, but found that the financial advantages were considerable. Without 501(c)(3) status, the center would not qualify for public funds, which help many community residents afford the $30 a day it costs to place an adult there.