This 73 Year Old Grandpa Has Comforted Premature Babies for 8 Years With the Same Six Heartfelt Words

When Dave Whitlow retired in 2017, he closed the book on a 43-year career in local government management and ran straight into the problem nobody warns you about: a whole life’s worth of usefulness, and nowhere left to put it.

He tried the usual answers. He walked shelter dogs. He worked the pharmacy at a free health clinic, then a food pantry. “All that was good, but didn’t quite scratch the itch,” he said.

A self-described introvert, he wasn’t hunting for applause. He wanted a place where showing up mattered to someone, every single time, whether or not anyone ever knew.

He found it in a rocking chair at the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, in a unit where some patients weigh less than a bag of flour. And it’s the last few seconds of every cuddle, the part almost nobody sees, that tell you exactly who he is.

Two Days a Week, Eight Babies a Day

Whitlow is 73 now. Twice a week, he walks into the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, gowns up, pulls on gloves, and gets to work. No medical degree, no scrubs of his own. His job title is simpler and, in its own way, just as serious: volunteer baby cuddler.

On a typical visit he holds five or six babies. On a busy day, eight. Some of them weigh less than 2 pounds.

He’s a father of two and a grandfather of three, but the babies he rocks are strangers’ children, born too early or too fragile, in a unit their parents can’t always reach around the clock.

Ask him what he’s doing in that chair and he doesn’t reach for anything grand. “I pretty much just want to be with them,” he said.

He Checks the Monitors Before Every Cuddle

There’s a version of this story where a sweet old man wanders in and pats a few heads. That is not this story.

Before Whitlow lifts anyone, he checks in with the nurses like a man reporting for a shift. “Tell me what this child is receiving. What kind of treatment?” he asks. Then he studies the screens above each bed. “I watch the monitors first to see whether positionally there’s anything to do to improve,” he said.

“There’s quite a reason this is called an intensive care unit,” he said in the hospital’s feature on his work.

He even consults his patients, eyes barely open, on their preferences. “I’ll ask them if they want to go to sleep or stay awake,” he said.

According to the hospital, one of his weekly visits falls on eye exam day, when he follows the ophthalmologist from bedside to bedside and settles each baby once the exam is over.

What a Pair of Steady Arms Does for a Two-Pound Body

If it seems strange that a hospital would treat cuddling as real medicine, the research says otherwise. Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester explains why programs like this exist at all: hospitals understand “the importance of infants being held,” and many parents “are unable to stay for extended periods of time with their infants due to work schedules and other obligations.”

The evidence behind that importance is measurable. A 2023 meta-analysis in the journal Midwifery, pooling 13 studies and 891 infants, found that kangaroo-style skin-to-skin contact helped babies hold a stable body temperature, settled their heart rates, and raised their oxygen saturation. Findings on breathing rates were mixed, and most of that research involves parents holding their own children.

A volunteer in a rocking chair isn’t a substitute for a mother’s chest, and nobody claims he is. He’s what stands between a two-pound baby and an empty afternoon when parents physically cannot be there.

You can’t put tenderness on a monitor. But the research suggests a held body registers it all the same.

Happy Hands and Heart

“He’s such an important part of the interdisciplinary team in the NICU,” said Elizabeth, a registered nurse in the unit.

Another nurse, Gabrielle, put it in plainer language: “He knows when we need him the most and he just comes in with happy hands and heart.”

“We adore him,” added Maya, the unit’s secretary, noting that he shows up with energy bars for the staff, too. The man came to hold babies and ended up feeding the nurses.

Whitlow sounds almost surprised by how deep in he is. “I interface with nurses, therapists and doctors. I didn’t realize how closely I’d be working with them,” he said.

Six Words, Five Hundred Babies

Then there’s the ritual, the quiet heart of the whole thing.

Before Whitlow puts any baby down, every baby, every visit, he leans in close and whispers the same six words: “Grow strong, grow smart, grow kind.”

He started at the hospital passing out books, then moved to cuddling infants withdrawing from substance exposure, then into the NICU itself. Along the way, by his own estimate, he has held more than 500 babies. That’s more than 500 tiny people sent into the world with the same whispered instructions.

Why those six words? “It’s important to me to think that this is what I want from people in general,” he said.

He spent four decades looking at community life “from a broad view,” as he put it. “Now I look at everything from 10 inches.”

The Room Where He Belongs

None of those babies will remember him. Not one will ever pick his face out of a crowd. The whisper isn’t for them to remember. It’s a hope pressed into them before they’re old enough to refuse it, from a man who expects nothing back.

The odds say that somewhere in Richmond, a kid pedaling a bike for the first time once slept, impossibly small, against Dave Whitlow’s shoulder.

Ask him why he’s still there after eight years, and there’s no philosophy, no speech. Just the sound of a man who found the room where he belongs.

“It’s the best gig I’ve ever had,” he said. “It just feels right.”