PROBLEM OF THE AGE: bringing the elderly and very young together sparks joy
Tiffany Dunk meets the participants of a heartwarming experiment giving a fresh lease on life to elderly Australians.
It’s a clear sunny day on Sydney’s northern beaches when a 95-yearold man flings his walking cane in the air and breaks into a run, his first in many years, in a determined attempt to win a competitive relay race. His companion, a beaming four-year-old, shouts encouragement as the pair nears the finish line in an event that nobody – not least the elderly competitors – saw coming.
Just a few short weeks ago, 11 residents of a nearby retirement village were chosen to take part in an experiment that many of them believed would be a waste of time. Lonely, bored, suffering a variety of ailments and physical impairments and with barely any human contact outside of the carers who tend to their immediate needs, they felt they had little left to live for in their twilight years. “We are here to die and the sooner the better,” said one grimly.
But then the doors swung open and a stream of boisterous four-year-old
preschoolers poured through, singing, laughing, happily waving hello to their elderly audience. Not only did the mood among these unhappy men and women visibly shift as they reciprocated the beaming smiles, but it was the start of what will prove to be a truly magical journey – and one for which you’ll want to bring your tissues.
So begins ABC’s observational documentary series Old People’s Home For 4 Year Olds – a televised experiment in intergenerational care that aims to not only transform the lives of 11 unhappy older Australians and their 10 pint-sized new playmates, but to kick off a national program which those involved hope will be a gamechanger for generations old and new.
Over the course of seven weeks, the elderly participants buddy up with their four-year-old partners and undertake a series of activities, from the physical to the creative to the mentally demanding. These challenges test their confidence and aim to get them feeling fitter,
healthier, happier and – crucially – more connected. And that’s important given the stark statistics around loneliness for this age group.
Over half of those moving into aged care suffer from depressive symptoms compared with just 10 per cent of the general population. To make matters worse, 40 per cent of residents receive no visitors and many spend up to 20 hours a day alone in their room. Loneliness makes the elderly sicker and sadder – it’s an unhappy and seemingly unstoppable cycle.
It’s certainly felt by those taking part in the project. Shirley is 90 and her score on the geriatric depression scale is among the highest in the group.
“I’m terribly lonely here,” she tells The Weekly. “I don’t have good neighbours, I don’t go out very much. I’m from a big family but they’ve all gone – Mum, Dad, all my sisters – so there’s nothing left for me.”
And while she has two children, three grandchildren and four
great-grandchildren, visits are few and far between for widowed Shirley, who is suffering from early-stage dementia.
“My family don’t want to come,” she says with resignation. “All they want to come down for is for what they’re going to get. They don’t stay very long and then they’re running in and out or jumping on my bed or doing something else I don’t want them to do. I wish there was something or somewhere I could go where there was somebody I like, where I had a friend.”
The science of ageing
Professor Sue Kurrle has been working as a geriatrician for 32 years. Her passion for the wellbeing of older people had already seen her self-fund an evidentiary project into the benefits of intergenerational care. So when producers of this innovative program came calling, she jumped in wholeheartedly as the lead advisor.
“This is something that has been on my mind for years,” she tells The Weekly of the experiment, for which a specially designed pre-school was built within the retirement home so that residents could easily attend. Craft, singing and dancing lessons, storytelling and physical exercise were all on the curriculum for both young and old.
“My mother has been in residential care for three-and-a-half years and I know the wonderful effect that her grandchildren have on her when they visit. Quite seriously, you see the positive effect that children have on older people and this experiment was taking it the next step. This was not just a simple interaction, this was involving the children with the older people and looking at the benefits of the interaction on both groups.”
In the UK, a series of Old People’s Home For 4 Year Olds had already examined the effects children have on the elderly and found it to be highly promising. The Australian version, however, aims to go a step further by scientifically measuring the impact on the youngest participants. Would they equally benefit from the experiment?
To that end, child development expert Dr Evan Kidd was also enlisted to study the results on the four-year-old charges. And while he was a fan of the original UK version, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to add much to the program.
“I was a little bit sceptical, I must admit, about seeing any difference in the kids,” he says, “but I was pleasantly surprised. With some of the kids, at least, they came into the experiment really shy and reticent and at the end of the seven weeks you saw measurable changes in them.”
The most marked development outside of increased confidence – a fact the children’s parents attested to during the show – was an encouraging one.
“We saw an improvement in a particular component of their language – the verbs you use to describe both your own and others’ psychological states,” Evan reveals.
“Interacting with the older residents created opportunities for the kids to reflect upon people’s emotional and mental states and resulted in an improvement of their understanding of others. The children were able to name and understand other people’s emotions.”
Breaking the cycle
For former infants teacher
Maureen, 81, the series came as an absolute godsend. Once active, sociable and with a passion for singing in the choir, chronic illness has stripped her ability to venture outside the retirement village. With visits from family scarce, loneliness has gradually tightened into a vice-like grip.
“I don’t see my own grandchildren very often, they’re all so busy,” she tells The Weekly several months after filming finished. “And I’ve been so unwell that I couldn’t even get out. It’s been hard and I was really down to the bottom.”
But the moment the four year olds arrived, she found a happiness that, she says, has given her a new lease on life. Not only that, but to her surprise she found herself physically doing things she was once sure were far beyond her capabilities.
“Straightaway I felt loved and wanted, which I hadn’t for ages,” she says, adding she quickly found a special friend in her buddy for the experiment, Michaela – who has kept up her visits.
“Michaela keeps me going,” Maureen smiles. “She looked after me and was so gentle – she would hold my hand and get my walker and all kinds of things. Every time she came to visit, that beautiful smile was there and she would come straight to me. She used to be quite shy, but she’s opening up.”
According to her mother, Debbie, for Michaela there has been an equally positive response. “She’s always been a bubbly and witty little girl who was
willing to help others,” the proud mum says as she watches on while her daughter plays happily with her 81-year-old new best friend.
“But after [taking part in the experiment] we’ve seen how caring she is when she sees Maureen and how she tries to help her. She’s more tolerant of other people’s capabilities, to see that they can’t always do what you want them to do and you have to change your own mindset and adapt what you’re doing so everyone can join in.”
Not only that, but Debbie is thrilled Michaela has been able to have an equally positive effect.
“Maureen explained how she felt before the show, how she felt during filming, and afterwards,” Debbie says. “She told me she didn’t really have a purpose. So it’s really good to see the relationship between her and Michaela develop. We’ll take her to lunch, go to her house and they do activities together, playing cards, playing piano.”
“I look so forward to her visits, I really do,” interjects Maureen. “I’m looking forward to the day when she can ring me and talk to me. She’s so intuitive, she’s just gorgeous.”
It’s a similar story for Shirley, whose original scepticism over the project was gradually swept away when she formed a special bond with four-year-old Tyrone – who has also returned for a visit with his mum Danielle today.
“He used to look up at me with those big eyes and I’d hold his hand and talk to him,” she says fondly. “I loved everything about it, I really did. I couldn’t wait for the next day to come. I was like a different person. I couldn’t wait to get out in the morning.”
But for Shirley, those giddy days have come to an end. “I’m back to where I started now,” she tells us sadly.
Looking to the future
The experts and the producers of this program hope the public can intercede by petitioning for intergenerational care facilities to be built around the country. There are facilities in Europe which have proved successful and if the results of Old People’s Home For
4 Year Olds (which you can see in full at the end of the series) hold true, it seems a no-brainer.
“We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get older people to move, to get them stronger again, get out of their chairs, out of their rooms, and we’re not terribly successful,” says Sue, whose work studying the problems of older people in Australia is award-winning. “This project just turned that around. That’s what hit home for me – these kids were so much more effective than I’ve been! I hope this will be the catalyst for older people and their families to realise this is a good thing.”
To that end, says Sue, we need to start asking aged care-providers, educators and the government to join the wave of change. “Providers won’t do it,” she explains, “unless the older people who are going to be coming in and paying are asking, ‘Are you doing it?’ My hope is that this program will work in a number of ways. It will work in convincing aged-care providers this is what they should be doing. It will hopefully get schools thinking about it. Then, of course, you need politicians interested. So we need the general public to nag their local members to say, ‘Why aren’t we doing more of this?’”
It’s a cause the parents of the children in the series are also keen to get behind.
“It should be done on a larger scale, especially for those who don’t have friends or family to visit and take them out,” says Debbie. “It gives them that opportunity to have another purpose in life as well as a chance to interact with other older people they might not meet elsewhere. It brings life back in terms of wanting to join in and do things.”
“It’s great to spend time with the elderly, the kids learn so much from them and they have amazing stories to tell,” agrees Danielle. “Tyrone has so much more confidence in himself since the show. He just adores Shirley and I’d love to get behind this program.”
“You’re taking two vulnerable but important groups – four year olds who are the future and elderly residents who are in their twilight years but have a wealth of experience about the world,” orginal cynic Evan adds in endorsement.
“If you can do something to jointly help both groups, that’s a really good thing. We need to think harder and better about how we can make people’s lives more enjoyable and fulfilling, and this is one way that can be done.”
It’s also a program all of us, no matter our current age or state of health, are likely to need at some point. So let’s face it, if we don’t start by encouraging our youngest to respect our elderly, what do we think is going to happen when we are reaching our own older years?
“We’re a very ageist society and yet all of us want to be part of that so-called grey tsunami – nobody wants to die at 60,” Sue states bluntly.
“My hope is this program will get us thinking differently. If you get children young and make them realise older people have something to offer other than just an inheritance when they die, we can change thinking.”
Old People’s Home For 4 Year Olds starts on Tuesday August 27 at 8.30pm on ABC and ABC iview.