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One nursing home is putting babies to work. The reward? Nappies, baby formula and photographs

In Japan, ‘baby workers’ brighten up dull days by spending time with nursing-home residents

As Japan’s population has aged, the use of nursing homes has grown rapidly. Photograph: iStock

Hikari Hida
John Yoon
Mon Sep 5 2022 - 05:00

Cooing, giggling and the patter of tiny feet mix with the sound of walkers and wheelchairs at a nursing home in southern Japan. In this greying nation, one home has been recruiting an unusual class of workers to enliven its residents’ days.

These are “baby workers” as the nursing home’s head calls them: 32 children so far, all younger than four years old, who spend time with its residents, who are mostly in their 80s. Residents strike up conversations with the young helpers. The babies, accompanied by their parents or guardians (usually mothers), offer the residents hugs.

The visitors’ reward? Nappies, baby formula, free baby photo shoots and coupons for a nearby cafe.

I don’t get to see my grandkids very often, so the baby workers are a great treat

The facility, Ichoan Nursing Home, is in Kitakyushu, a city of 940,000 in Fukuoka prefecture that is ageing and shrinking like the rest of Japan. As families have become smaller and older people more isolated, the nursing home’s baby worker programme has helped people connect across generations.

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“I don’t get to see my grandkids very often, so the baby workers are a great treat,” says 85-year-old Kyoko Nakano, who has lived at the nursing home for more than a year.

While she enjoys knitting and watching TV, she says she drops everything to spend time with the babies and toddlers when they arrive.

“They are just so cute, and they make the whole place brighter,” Nakano says. “Young energy is different.”

As Japan’s population has aged, the use of nursing homes has grown rapidly. The number of people in such homes more than doubled, to 1.8 million, between 2005 and 2020, according to the Japanese government. Life can be lonely and dull there, but at Ichoan Nursing Home, residents say that the babies brought energy and light.

Studies have linked social interaction with less loneliness, delayed mental decline, lower blood pressure and reduced risk of disease and death among older people. Socialising across generations has also been shown to draw older people out, making them smile and talk more. For children, these intergenerational interactions have been shown to enhance social and personal development.

The concept of letting nursing home residents interact with children is not new. In Seattle in the US, residents of Providence Mount St Vincent have shared their facility with a childcare programme for newborns to five-year-olds since 1991.

The babies decide when they come and for how long they want to stay

Among Ichoan’s 120 residents, the oldest is 101, says Kimie Gondo, the nursing home’s director. The youngest baby worker, at two months old, can barely hold his head up, she says.

Gondo says she was inspired to start the programme last year when she took her newborn granddaughter with her to work and saw how the residents smiled and played with her.

“I thought it was selfish to only have my granddaughter enjoy this special time,” she says, “so we decided to open it up to any baby that wanted to come do the same work.”

Expectations are loose for the little visitors, since they can be hard to corral. Toddlers are asked to stroll around the nursing home and interact with the residents, and parents help the babies circulate.

“Nothing is mandatory,” Gondo says. “The babies decide when they come and for how long they want to stay.”

Parents at Ichoan, whose children are mostly too small for school or day-care, say that the nursing home gave their children a rare opportunity to socialise safely at a time when Covid risks have kept many families cooped up. They say they trust that the nursing home has taken proper precautions against virus transmission to protect its vulnerable residents.

One mother, 31-year-old Mika Shintani, says she signed her daughter up because she wanted her to encounter people beyond her immediate family. She also says she felt more comfortable taking her to the nursing home than to a park or a friend’s home.

“My daughter was spending the majority of her days only interacting with me,” she says, “so I thought seeing other faces would be good for her.”

Gondo says that she had not yet seen a father accompanying a baby at Ichoan. Men in Japan do fewer hours of household chores and child care than in any of the wealthiest nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

On her daughter’s first day, Shintani says, she was five months old and cried when she arrived at the facility in her stroller. But she quickly warmed up to the residents and started laughing and playing with the women there, so they started going every two weeks.

The perks of the programme are not just the tangible ones, like nappies and formula, she says: “On the days my daughter is hard at work, I don’t have to cook lunch!” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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