In Belgium, Combining Lonely Elderly and Vulnerable Children in One Home is a Win-Win Solution

And whether the elderly can dance the limbo, accompanied by children who hold the stick at a reasonable height. Then they play donkey poke, can throw. It clatters like clockwork in the brasserie of Domaine des Lys, a retirement home in Vottem, municipality of Liège, where a belated carnival party is being celebrated on this weekday.

Twelve children aged 3 to 12 have been living in the home since September last year, who were removed from their homes for various reasons, together with about two hundred elderly people. The boarding school where the children stayed during the week, in the nearby village of Milmort, was thoroughly renovated and an emergency solution was sought. There was plenty of room at Domaine des Lys, because just like in many retirement homes in Wallonia, many beds were empty.

Fermabel, a Belgian umbrella organization in elderly care, calculated in August 2020 that about 10 percent of the beds in Walloon retirement homes remain empty, almost twice as many as before the corona pandemic. This is partly due to the large number of deaths in the highest age category. But there’s more going on.

High inflation in Belgium due to the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis has forced many elderly care institutions to increase rates in recent months, Vincent Fredericq, president of the Walloon federation for rest homes, said. RTL info. On average, a bed in a Walloon care home became about 150 euros more expensive last year, up to 1,800 euros per month. If you compare this with the Walloon minimum pension of about 1,600 euros, you will see that the elderly could get into trouble if they were raised. That is why they have to stay at home longer and nursing homes are left with empty beds.

In the case of Domaine des Lys, there was so much empty space that an entire wing of the building could easily be made available to the children. This unintentionally created a social experiment with potentially one win-win-win situation. Could it be that battered children find peace in the vicinity of a grandparent figure and, conversely, the elderly no longer have to be lonely because children keep them company, while at the same time they together ensure a better occupation of the home?

Modest success

Half a year on the road, the experiment seems to be a modest success, at least when there is something to celebrate. Employees of both the boarding school and the nursing home walk around after lunch in clown suits or dressed as Nintendo figure Mario. Dozens of elderly people, whether or not from a wheelchair, watch the spectacle at the front of the room; there, children and the elderly dance together. “When we get older, we go back to our childhood,” says Jean-Marie Moermans (78), who brought his wife Alberta to Domaine des Lys last week. Pipes of Jupiler beer are circulated in the hall. There are cupcakes for the kids.

The 92-year-old Maria, who emigrated from Sicily decades ago, finds it all so contagious that she beckons for guidance. “I want to dance too,” she shouts, and a moment later she shuffles forward with the hand of an employee in her flowery dress. There she has to be careful not to be run over by a boy in an Aladin suit who races through space with an old lady in a wheelchair. Genevieve Vasbinder, director of the retirement home, looks at it with a smile from a distance.

Contact with children does me good, then I don’t miss mine so much

Paolo (76) resident of a retirement home

She says that her organization did not have to think long when the boarding school asked if there were any rooms available at her place. But in practice it turned out to be a challenge to find times when the time schedules of the children and the elderly overlapped. “The children usually don’t come back from school until four o’clock and that’s just when many elderly people want their evening meal. After that, they want to take it easy until they go to sleep. We quickly realized that holidays are the best times to bring the two groups together.”

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For example, the children and the elderly have already celebrated Sinterklaas, Christmas and Halloween together in recent months. “With Sinterklaas you saw that the elderly acted as grandparents. And during Christmas no one was lonely with us.”

Clown in hospitals

In the brasserie, people cheerfully continue with the next game. The 65-year-old François Goulon, a man without too many teeth in his mouth, visibly enjoys the carnival party. “I used to work as a clown in hospitals to cheer up children. Now they do that to me,” says the former firefighter, who ended up in the nursing home due to an occupational accident. Paolo (76) had his face painted as a panda bear for the occasion. “Contact with children is good for me. Then I won’t miss mine so much.”

And the children themselves, what do they think of it? Eden (10), dressed as a ninja, was not used to dealing with the elderly. He barely sees his own father. “When we are with them, it means we are going to do something fun. And I’m actually used to them now,” he says. Shun (12) and Gabriel (12) are less enthusiastic. They find it “embarrassing” to talk to the elderly because the topics “they” want to talk about are not in line with what they like. And yet Antonella Mannoia (37), supervisor of the children, has recently seen something beautiful. “The more they are together, the more they get used to each other. They relax through and with each other.”

The experiment in Domaine des Lys is just coming to an end. The renovation of the youth boarding school should be completed on 1 July and then the children will return. But, says director Vasbinder, “we will continue to celebrate holidays together. We have seen that this has great benefits for both groups.” It is not yet known whether the experiment will be followed elsewhere in Belgium.

A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of March 22, 2023