A Natural Step : Stride Rite’s pioneer day-care program brings kids and seniors together.

Her children and grandchildren were grown, and her husband had died “quite a few” years ago. Like many people her age, Eva DaRosa, 79, used to spend a lot of lonely time window-shopping at the mall.

“Well,” she said with a shrug, “it was better than staying at home.”

But these days the retired school cafeteria worker has little time for such frivolity. She is far too busy reading story books, overseeing baking projects and teaching 4-year-olds to crochet. In between, she meets with new friends her own age and has been working on a project: tracking how inflation has raised prices in recent decades.

“It’s very different from what I used to do,” DaRosa said. “It’s something that I think is very nice for older people.”

With three other women close to her own age, DaRosa is part of a pioneer program to bridge the generations in a corporate day-care setting.

The Intergenerational Day Care Center at the Stride Rite shoe corporation--which also was the setting for the nation’s first on-site corporate child-care program in 1971--is believed to be the country’s first, privately undertaken effort to provide a common care facility for young children and seniors.

“It just seemed so apparent,” said Stride Rite Chief Executive Officer Arnold Hiatt, who initiated the center. “It just seemed to be a natural to bring together these two different groups, children and elders, who have a lot to offer each other.”

The program, which has been in operation less than a month, will eventually accommodate 55 children and 24 seniors. The children range in age from 18 months to 5 years; seniors are defined as anyone older than 60.

There is no formal health requirement, but in what Karen Leibold, Stride Rite program development director, calls “a real loose” categorization, seniors must be able to feed and dress themselves, and take care of their basic needs.

Airy and colorful, the 8,500-square-foot facility, which is in the midst of Stride Rite’s corporate headquarters, was designed by Katherine McGuinness & Associates to be wheelchair accessible. One wing houses four classrooms for children of different ages, while the seniors’ wing has three separate areas to accommodate quiet and noisy activities.

A central zone houses offices and a kitchen and dining facility shared by the generations.

There is enough privacy and separation that a senior can read a novel in peace at one end, while at the other six 4-year-olds engage in a vociferous game of tag or hide-and-seek.

“It was a challenge,” McGuinness said, “because, on the one hand, you are creating a homey setting, but it is not a home. On the other, you are creating an institutional setting, but it is not an institution.”

The challenge extended far beyond the time or the $700,000 appropriated for developing the new center’s physical surroundings.

Just about three years ago, Leibold remembered, she received a memo from Hiatt. Attached to Hiatt’s note was a newspaper article about a family in New York City who had an elderly parent enrolled in care in one part of the city and a child in day care in another part.

“It caught his imagination,” Leibold said.

The note he sent her inquired: “Wouldn’t it make sense to do this in one place?”

Leibold and her staff looked for models, but found none.

What they did learn was that, according to the National Council on Aging, about 40% of the American work force is involved in providing care for both children and seniors.

That figure is expected to jump dramatically in the next decade as the number of individuals older than 65 doubles.

In that same decade, Leibold learned, the percentage of women of childbearing age entering the work force is expected to top 80%. The crunch will come as women--society’s traditional family care-givers--are responsible simultaneously for children and elderly relatives, and are working outside the home, too.

A survey of Stride Rite employees mirrored the trend.

Already, 25% of the shoe conglomerate’s employees said they were providing some sort of elder care; 13% more expected to be providing it in the next five years.

“The whole issue of elder care is just beginning to bubble,” Leibold said. “It’s something that legislators and corporate America are going to have to address.”

She predicted that elder care would become a major family-care topic for the ‘90s, and that unlike child care, legislators and corporate leaders would find it difficult to shunt elder care aside as some kind of nagging “women’s issue.”

“The decision-makers and the corporation-makers have elderly parents. They do not necessarily have young children,” Leibold said.

“I think you will see that men are taking part more and more in this area,” she continued. “At least they are becoming more cognizant. They are doing their wills, and they are looking around and realizing it is their parents who are requiring attention.”

Still, after three years of careful planning, the new intergenerational center was received with some hesitancy by Stride Rite employees. Only one has actually enrolled an aging relative in the $150-a-week program; the other seniors have come from the Cambridge community and its environs.

Leibold and her staff, however, remain undaunted.

“I keep telling people that we opened the child-care center with seven kids,” she said. “Adult day care is so new in and of itself that people don’t know what to make of it. We have a fair amount of educating to do with the children of the elders.”

Besides, in her research, Leibold said she learned that “the other thing about elder care that is very different from child care in that what precipitates the need is often a crisis. Mom falls and breaks her hip and then she needs care. Mom dies, and Dad moves in for a month--and the month stretches into a year.

“There is a fair amount of uncertainty about it. You don’t know when or even whether you’re going to need it. It’s not the same as having a child, where you know you’re going to need care for six years.”

Seniors also get a vote in their activities, and may require some persuading, Leibold said: “You can’t just tell your parents, ‘This is where you’re going to go.’ ”

Although the center also serves as a teacher-training site for students and as a research facility for faculty from nearby Wheelock College--as well as a local elder services program--the new Stride Rite program recognizes its role as a national model for companies.

But CEO Hiatt said he chafes slightly at that characterization: “On paper that may be true. In reality, I’m a little more cynical. I think businessmen have to broaden their perspectives as to what constitutes their responsibility. It’s more than just dollars-earned-per-share.”

The corporate machinations were of little concern to Eva DaRosa.

“I love the kids, and I love being around them. I don’t care what they do,” she said. “I think it’s good for the children to have us here, too. It shows them that they are wanted and loved. It gives them a little bit of security, sort of.”

In any case, DaRosa said, “Age doesn’t count. It’s how you feel in your heart.”

Far from the kind of awkward first interactions that the planners of the program might have feared or envisioned in their nightmares, Leibold said the intergenerational effort took off without a hitch.

“We just dumped a bunch of Legos on the table, and the elders and the children were perfectly content with each other,” she said.

DaRosa said she is so enthusiastic about the day-care program that every morning she is fully dressed by 7, a full hour before her daughter takes her to the center. On weekends, she said, she practically proselytizes to other people her age about the center.

“I tell my friends, ‘Why don’t you get up out of bed and get over there?’ ” DaRosa said.

Her eagerness is apparently shared by the day-care program’s younger contingent.

“I like having Eva here because Eva reads books to us,” Victor Siu, 5, said. “It’s like having my grandma here.”

Nicholas McCafferty, also 5, agreed about DaRosa: “I like her a lot. She’s fun.”