Every second week a small bus pulls up outside a North Shore rest home and unloads its noisiest, most unpredictable visitors. A group of preschoolers from a nearby early learning centre tumbles through the doors of Alden’s Rosedale Retirement Village in Auckland, and for the next hour the usual rhythm of bingo and happy hours gives way to balloons, singing and the gentle chaos that only three and four year olds can bring.
The fortnightly visits, run with children from Lollipops Albany, have become one of the most anticipated dates on the calendar for residents who can otherwise go long stretches with little contact beyond staff and the occasional family member. As RNZ reported, the sessions mix familiar games with a bit of invention, including balloon rallies where pool noodles stand in for bats and everyone, young and old, tries to keep the balloon off the floor.
For the people who organise life inside a rest home, the value of the children is not complicated. They are simply different. “They do bingo, they’ve got happy hours all of that but kids are just something completely different which I think they appreciate,” activities coordinator Jolene Chidrawi told RNZ. She did not soften the contrast with the days in between. “It’s just something different in a usually very dull existence,” she said. “The kids make it beautiful.”
The residents are just as direct about what the visits mean to them. Mary Howard said she counts down to each one. “I think it’s wonderful. I love seeing the children and I love being with the children. It gives us laughs,” she said. Another resident, Angela Hobson, said part of the pleasure was simply watching the children be themselves, with some of them as excited to be there as the people they had come to see. Glenice Griffin said the unpredictability was the whole point, because you never quite knew what the children were going to do next.
The benefit runs in both directions. Children who spend time around older people tend to be more comfortable with frailty, walking frames and the slower pace of old age, and the teachers who bring them say the visits stay with the youngsters long after the bus has gone. Lollipops Albany team leader Jae Wilson said the children talked about the trips once they were back at the centre, telling staff how much fun they had had. For children growing up in a country where many grandparents live in another town, another island or another country, an afternoon with a room full of willing surrogate grandparents is not a small thing.
What looks like a sweet local arrangement is also a response to a problem that public health researchers have been warning about for years. Loneliness is now treated as a health risk in its own right, not just an unhappy state of mind. The World Health Organisation has estimated that one in six people worldwide feels lonely, and that the toll includes hundreds of thousands of deaths a year linked to the effects of social isolation. Among older adults the figures are starker, with up to a third experiencing loneliness or isolation, a burden that researchers link to higher rates of inflammation, heart disease, dementia and earlier death. You can read the WHO’s findings in its report on social connection.
Set against that, regular contact with young children is a low cost, low technology intervention that rest homes can run with little more than goodwill and a willing early learning centre down the road. The wider evidence is encouraging if still developing. A growing body of research, including a 2024 pilot study of a co located aged care and early learning programme, has found that bringing the very old and the very young together can lift mood, social connectedness and quality of life, while building confidence and empathy in the children. The same studies are honest about the limits, with some finding no measurable change in clinical loneliness scores, a reminder that an hour of balloons is not a cure for the deeper isolation many older New Zealanders feel.
Alden’s Rosedale is far from alone in trying. Intergenerational care has quietly spread across the country, with early learning centres and rest homes pairing up from Wellington to the regions, and the New Zealand Aged Care Association has recognised several such programmes through its excellence awards. The model has also been popularised internationally by television series that filmed four year olds moving into rest homes for a few weeks, with cameras capturing residents standing taller, talking more and laughing again. What the Albany programme shows is that the same effect can be produced without a film crew, on a normal Tuesday, with a bus and a box of pool noodles.
For the residents waiting by the windows on visit days, the research is beside the point. They know what the noise and the small hands and the unscripted moments do for them. As the laughter from a balloon rally drifts down a corridor that is usually very quiet, the case for keeping the bus coming makes itself.
Does your local rest home or early learning centre run something like this, and have you seen what it does for the people taking part? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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