Marlene Peters, 85, moved into Bayview retirement community at the base of Queen Anne Hill partly because toddlers play in the lobby.

Peters, a retired teacher and school librarian, has spent five years reading picture books to preschoolers while fellow residents listen from nearby chairs.

She is one of about 200 adults, ages 62 to 101, living alongside 42 children at Bayview's Intergenerational Children's Center, a licensed daycare serving kids from 6 weeks to 5 years old.

The nonprofit opened in 1961. Its daycare followed in 1996, modeled on a longer-running program at Providence Mount St. Vincent in West Seattle, the Seattle Times reported Aug. 30.

"The daycare is exposing the kids to wheelchairs and walkers and canes and hearing aids, so it's normal for them, it's not scary," Bayview CEO Nancy Weinbeck told the Seattle Times.

Adult residents often come down from their apartments to hang out in the garden with the children. Bayview also runs a weekly music program that brings both groups together.

Only about a dozen long-term care facilities in Washington also operate childcare, according to Sheri Steinig of Generations United, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. Still, the state leads the nation in offering these programs. The Mount, as the West Seattle facility is known, has run its version for 35 years, housing 400 elder-care residents and a preschool with space for 103 children in a building designed for both.

Debbie Cutter, 67, president of Bayview's residents council, told the Seattle Times that spending time around the children lifts her spirits. Molly Swain, director of The Mount's foundation, said preschool graduates tend to be more comfortable around older adults and more likely to start a conversation with someone in a wheelchair.

Running both a daycare and a long-term care facility means navigating two separate sets of regulations. Both sectors face low worker pay and staff shortages. In March 2025, U.S. Rep. Marilyn Strickland (D-WA-10) and Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI-01) introduced the bipartisan Care Across Generations Act, which would create a federal grant program for long-term care facilities to operate or partner with childcare providers.

Bayview sits on land originally given by Charles A. Kinnear, a member of a pioneering Seattle family, to the First United Methodist Church for one purpose: the care of the elderly or children.