Intergenerational daycare aiming to strengthen bonds between kids and ‘grandfriends’

Among the thousands of new child-care spaces opening up across the country is a unique centre in Ottawa nestled at the heart of a long-term care campus, a dementia- and kid-friendly space meant to truly integrate the children and the seniors they sweetly dub “grandfriends.”

There are a few child-care centres located within long-term care homes and an intergenerational daycare located in the community, and this joint effort from Andrew Fleck Children’s Services and Perley Health builds on that model, aiming to establish fully intergenerational child care.

The new daycare, set to open this spring, will be at the centre of Perley Health, where both long-term care residents and grandfriends from the independent living apartments will be able to join a collage-making activity, bake muffins, read stories with the children, eat alongside them in the cafeteria, or simply sit and watch them play.

Perley Health has its own research arm and is studying the benefits to young and old with an eye to sharing their findings and having this project serve as a model for more intergenerational child-care centres across Canada.

Laura Dale Boucher, 72, knows the benefits firsthand.

A resident of Perley’s independent living apartments, Boucher has been attending an EarlyON intergenerational playgroup run by Andrew Fleck for about three years.

“I find my place to recharge and raise my sense of well-being and hope is spending time with the little ones and reading to them and playing games and watching them explore,” she said. 

“I find that very uplifting and rejuvenating and it actually raises my spirits very considerably.”

Boucher said she is often one of the younger grandfriends in the playgroup, with personal support workers bringing people decades older, some of whom have dementia. It is clear they too are getting something out of the experience, even if interactions are limited, said Boucher.

Alex Wood agrees. He and his wife have brought their one-year-old daughter to the playgroup, where she did little dances in front of the grandfriends or brought them books.

“We went one week and we were told by one woman’s caregiver that after the last session, where that woman had got to interact a bit with the kids, she said it was the first night in ages that she hadn’t cried herself to sleep,” he said. 

“So it was a really powerful moment and I know my wife and I really gained an appreciation for just bringing the kids together with the older generation and even those who might be in the later stages of dementia and can’t really directly engage with them, it’s still really powerful just having that interaction.”

Annie Robitaille, Commissionaires Ottawa Research Chair at the Perley Health Centre of Excellence, said research exists on the benefits of intergenerational interactions, but not much specifically on the level of integration that this new daycare will bring.

“If you look at intergenerational programming in general, then you see that it has an impact on the level of engagement in meaningful activities, it reduces loneliness, it increases their mood, and so it’s been demonstrated to have lots of positive outcomes,” she said.

“There’s way less research when we come to an actual child-care program in a long-term care home. We’re presented with a rare opportunity because it hasn’t been opened yet, so we can actually look at some of the measures before it’s open, and then see how things change once the child-care program actually opens.”

Wood and his wife would love for their daughter to attend the new daycare opening next year, but they also know they will likely be out of luck. The 49 spaces are being prioritized for workers at the long-term care home and staff surveys suggest they will all be snatched up when registration opens.

Katrin Spencer, Perley’s director of strategy, partnerships and growth, said that will go a long way toward recruitment and retention of long-term care staff, a challenge in the sector.

The Perley is like a small town, Spencer said, with about 800 staff, 600 residents and 400 volunteers.

“If you think about a village, it also includes all generations,” she said.

“If we think about life in a community it includes, actually, also children and family every single day. So really, this is what sparked the idea because this is really our idea at Perley Health — provide a quality of life with purpose and joy.”

The space is designed specifically for both generations — sound absorbing, larger than normal to accommodate grandfriends with mobility devices and dementia-friendly, with no surface glare, calm lighting and clear sightlines.

A few long-term care homes in Toronto also house daycares, including the city-run Lakeshore Lodge with Marguerite Butt Early Learning and Child Care Centre. Officials and staff there are excited to hear more about the Ottawa project and vowed to also start using the term grandfriends.

They recently resumed joint activities post-pandemic, and those are often centred around holidays and special events. For Halloween, residents and children decorated pumpkins and went through a “haunted” house in the auditorium. They did a flag raising for Pride month, held a parade during Toronto Caribbean Carnival, made paper lanterns and Play-Doh moon cakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival and had the children make and hand out cards to residents for Grandparents’ Day.

Residents always ask when the next activity with the children will be, said Mark Lundrigan, Lakeshore Lodge’s manager of resident services. It allows them to maintain connections to the community, maintain mobility through music and movement activities with the kids and to maintain cognitive skills, and more, he said.

“I think one of the biggest advantages is it just gives them a sense of purpose, because as they get older, they move in here, and they’re receiving a lot of care, but this is an opportunity for them to provide reciprocal care, to give back and help others,” Lundrigan said.

Kim Hiscott, CEO of Andrew Fleck Children’s Services, said she believes the new, purpose-built, intergenerational child-care centre will be the first of its kind in Canada, but not the last.

“We’re really hoping it’ll be a model,” she said. 

“I’m really hoping, actually, it’ll highlight that any, any, any investment in long-term care, public investment of funds to develop long-term care, should include child care. It doesn’t make sense to be using public funds and then not capitalizing on the opportunity to also meet the huge child care need.” 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 20, 2025.