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

"There are still big barriers to the financing of adult day-care centers," she says. "Medicare rules haven't caught up with this type of care yet. While it costs $80 to $100 a day to keep someone in a nursing home, the costs for adult day care are less, and the experience can be more pleasant for a certain stage in life. But most centers do not qualify for Medicare funds."

Miller says the struggle for her center has been to break even, a goal she says they are closer to accomplishing. While her focus has been on getting community elders into the program first, she wants to market more within the company during the coming year.

"We have 150 child-care slots and a waiting list of 25; someday it will be the same for elder care," she says.

The staff at the Lancaster center hears from the adult children of the elderly participants that their parents seem more lively after having been at the center. "It's a way for a family to keep an adult in a family setting as long as possible," Miller says.

Intergenerational care may be the wave of the future. A company in Maryland is looking for foster grandparents to provide child-care services, and an industrial park on Long Island, N.Y., has recently opened an intergenerational care center.

"There's just something good that happens when you put children and elders together," Johnson says. "Something in the child will speak to elderly people who haven't shown any interest in anything for a long time. It's as if the child inside them is calling to them."

Progressive Employers Wrestle with Elder-care Benefits

Employers taking the lead in work-and-family programs are thinking about how to best help their employees with elder-care responsibilities; but elder care as part of a dependent-care benefits package is still absent in the majority of companies.

A recent survey by The Conference Board's Work-Family Research and Advisory Panel, which includes companies with some of the most progressive programs, found that while elder-care programs are being implemented in many of these companies, utilization by employees is still low--an average of about 5 percent of those who have access to elder-care benefits. This is expected to change within the next five years, as more employees' parents reach the age when they will need care.

The survey, "Work-Family Roundtable: Elder Care," found that more than half of the companies surveyed offered six types of support activities: family leave, flexible work arrangements, dependent-care spending accounts, seminars on aging issues, resource and referral services, and family counseling on aging issues.

"Counseling and support groups were named one of the most important aspects of the program by those employers who offered them," said Daniel Dreyer, the primary researcher for the survey. "They allow employees to talk about their trials and successes and identify with others who may have the same situation. They are one of the easiest programs to put in place and have a great payoff."

Dreyer said that for employees, elder care is a more complicated issue emotionally than child care. Employees may wrestle with guilt or fear at the thought of asking their parents to go into an adult day-care facility or a nursing home.