Staffing

Typically, the staff members you hire will have expertise in working with either children or adults, not both. They may lack knowledge about child or adult development and/or feel uncomfortable interacting with a new population. Staff who work with older adults may need to understand the challenges of a child with a speech delay or ADHD type behaviors. Child care staff may need to learn how to work with older adults who have dementia or aphasia.

Although most shared sites conduct training on policies and procedures related to working with children and/or older adults, often they provide little information about intergenerational best practices. Involving staff in orientation and training specifically focused on cross-age programming will increase buy-in and improve the quality of your program.

The following are eleven best practices for intergenerational programming in sites involving young children and frail elders that were identified by Jarrott and DeBord. These best practices can be taught in a day-long, pre-service training, over a period of time through in-service meetings. You can use a variety of teaching tools to help participants understand these best practices and learn facilitative behaviors that will enhance the quality of cross-age interaction. In addition to discussing the content, consider:

• Role-playing some scenarios in which staff lead activities
• Creating case studies/scenarios that require participants to problem-solve
• Engaging staff in self-reflection about their own communication styles

Practice 1: Staff members of the adult and child programs collaborate to plan activities

Typically, staff who work with either elders or children only have training and experience with one age group. Meeting together, they can learn more about the competencies of each group, appropriate expectations of participant behaviors, ways to share the workload of program-planning, and also reflect on the effectiveness of specific activities.

Ongoing training is critical to the long-term success of your program. Many issues will arise once intergenerational programming has begun, and staff members are faced with real-life challenges. Regularly bringing together staff working with children and those working with older adults will provide opportunities for them to reflect on successes and challenges and examine ways to continually improve activities. It is important that in-service training also reflects the interests of staff.  Getting input from staff about specific training topics they need/want is likely to increase their buy-in.

Consider asking these questions:

• In structured activities and informal interactions, what are we doing to encourage communication and connection between children and older adults? What works and what doesn’t work?
• What else could we do to build trusting relationships?
• Are we engaging participants in designing activities that build on their strengths and reflect their interests? What more could we be doing?
• Are there ways we could better use or modify our physical environment that would enhance relationship-building across generations?

(Adapted from training designed by Ebenezer Ridges)

When planning staff training, it is important to pay attention to both cross-training and reciprocal training (Sanchez, Campos and Rodriguez, 2021):

• Cross-generation training: practitioners need to gain more expertise in the different generational groups at the shared site, not just the main group they are involved with every day.
• Reciprocal training: practitioners from one section (e.g., adult day services) should exchange knowledge with colleagues in the other section (e.g., nursery school).

Some topics for In-service meetings:

• Understanding strategies for involving people with dementia in intergenerational activities
• Understanding challenges related to working with children with special needs
• Dealing with Loss and Grief

In addition to holding regular in-service meetings to enhance knowledge and skills, it is important to create opportunities for staff from various programs to get to know each other and build trusting relationships.

Relationships – whether between staff members or children and older adults – are at the core of intergenerational shared sites.

Here are some ideas for building your intergenerational team:

• Create a space where staff from different departments can hang out informally. One shared break room can also save money.
• Focus on building a culture of shared responsibility and collective competence.
• Allocate time for joint staff training, program planning, debriefing (right after each activity),, and evaluation.
• Distribute a calendar of intergenerational events to all staff (including maintenance, food service, and administrative staff) and invite them to stop by.
• Highlight successful cross-departmental partnerships and the contributions of staff members in site newsletters.
• Discuss how to handle advice given by older adults regarding “discipline” issues. Staff in the older adult program may need to understand which child behaviors are and are not appropriate and then explain that to older participants.
• Celebrate together (e.g., an annual family picnic, holiday events, teacher and nurse appreciation weeks).
• Provide opportunities for staff to spend time in each other’s programs and activities.
• Be clear about your expectations for staff members working with children and older adults (e.g., supporting residents to get to the activity area, setting up chairs for the activity, writing a reminder of the activity on the schedule board). Here is a list of expectations from ONEgeneration.
• Share common words and phrases used in classrooms. It is important that staff working with older adults understand classroom rules and how to communicate with children. It is also important to explore how to talk about people with dementia and/or those with disabilities. Language matters!