Comes from childhood. Why do we need a kindergarten for adults? Kindergarten for adults: “In one day you will relax as in a month in Goa Kindergarten for adults
Novosibirsk resident Evgeniy decided to bring adults back to childhood and provide an unexpected alternative to boring office routine. The first kindergarten for adults has been operating in the city since October 6. The AiF-Novosibirsk correspondent learned about why adults need to go to kindergarten, how much it costs, what you can do there, and why rely on the “childish” component of a person from the creator of the “after-school education” institution, Evgeniy Pyatkovsky.
Porridge, compote and singing
Evgeny Pyatkovsky, a successful programmer, decided in his new project to rely on the “childish” component of a person. He believes that this is an excellent alternative to the boring office environment.
Boys and girls, that is, men and women, are offered the interior, daily routine and entertainment of the kindergarten. Breakfast, lunch, sleep time, then afternoon snack. Porridge, casserole, cocoa, compote - a full spectrum of nostalgia for the halcyon years. And educational activities - “children” sing at musical events, applied arts also delight them - they enjoy drawing and sculpting from plasticine.
The staff was selected with full responsibility - they are experienced kindergarten teachers.
They don’t offer pacifiers and potties - “we have a kindergarten, not a nursery,” says Evgeniy. They don’t take you out for walks either: “Handholding across the road? No, it's too funny."
Happiness is in childhood
Already on the first day the group was fully staffed - 10 people. These are quite serious people - mostly bank managers.
One day of stay will cost a kindergartener 3 thousand rubles. The contingent, of course, changes daily - after all, business people can rarely afford a break from work. According to the entrepreneur, by October 15, all groups have been formed - a list of 80 people has been compiled. Groups are selected based on similar interests and ages.
Men aged 28-40 and women aged 23-30 signed up for “childhood”. “Women seem to come to meet men. They say that an adult child from a kindergarten is better than an alcoholic from a bar,” the director of the “uncle’s kindergarten” laughs.
The entrepreneur invested 600 thousand rubles in organizing the business. The area of the garden is 120 square meters.
Evgeny Pyatkovsky believes in his project: “Business people come to us who are tired of all sorts of trainings and quests - they want happiness. But happiness only happens in childhood.”
There are plans not to limit ourselves to the residential area of Novosibirsk, but to open kindergartens in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
“The question is to make a person feel like a child, and this is only possible when they communicate with him like a child,” the creator of the “City of Childhood” project, Novosibirsk programmer Evgeny Pyatkovsky told Business FM
A kindergarten for adults has opened in Novosibirsk. For 3,000 rubles, you can spend a day there following the routine of a real kindergarten: exercise, breakfast with casseroles and porridge, playing outside, drawing, singing and, of course, quiet time.
All the client’s gadgets will be taken away from the client immediately at the entrance, so that he will forget about work at least for a day. No calls, not a single business piece of paper - just a carefree childhood, as stated on the cheerfully designed website of the City of Childhood project. This is psychological relief, an escape from reality, the project’s creator, Novosibirsk programmer Evgeny Pyatkovsky, explained to Business FM.
Evgeniy Pyatkovskyprogrammer, creator of the “City of Childhood” project“We sat and thought about what happiness is and whether it ever existed at all. We came to the general opinion that happiness was in kindergarten. At school they were already forced to study, and the most carefree time was just in kindergarten. There are so many courses, trainings, quests, and whatnot. In essence, all this is a desire to renounce reality, from reality, emotional unloading, a whole day without a phone and with a quiet hour. I assure you, you will have the same relaxation as a month in Goa. Yesterday we opened for the first day, until the 15th everything was packed, ten people a day. My daughter brought me a caterpillar made from colored paper about a month ago, which she made in kindergarten. I tried to make the same one, but it turned out worse. You can then take a souvenir with you. In the drawing they write: “Masha, 30 years old.” There are more men, 70 percent. Age - from 25 to 40 years. The workers are current or former kindergarten teachers, that is, they know their job. The question is to make a person feel like a child. And you can feel like a child only when you communicate with him like a child, that’s all.”
Programmer Evgeny Pyatkovsky is confident in the success of his project and is thinking about opening similar gardens for adults in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They will be in demand, but not for long and among a very narrow circle of people, says psychologist and business coach Grigory Kramskoy.
Grigory Kramskoypsychologist, business coach“The Japanese were the first in such innovation. This is in demand to some extent. Interest in this is manifested at the level of trying something interesting, new, trendy. There are always a certain number of people who try something new, such experimenters in the consumer market. The second class of consumers of such a service are people who have a tremendous desire to reduce the level of responsibility in their lives, to be irresponsible at least for a while. There is an illusion that this is typical for people like top managers who have an overload of responsibility. Here, the organizers will most likely be disappointed. These are people who were forced into very responsible conditions and do not really want to be responsible everywhere and always, it’s just that here they have a legal opportunity to be irresponsible. People who run big businesses and build careers like to be responsible.”
There are similar kindergartens without children in the USA, but you can spend whole weeks there and even stay overnight. In addition, the client is picked up in the evening by a fake parent-actor.
A kindergarten for adults has opened in Saratov. There you can spend the day according to the routine of a real kindergarten: exercises, breakfast with casseroles and porridge, playing outside, drawing, modeling from plasticine and the obligatory quiet hour. All the client’s gadgets will be taken away from the client immediately at the entrance, so that he will forget about work at least for a day. No calls, not a single business piece of paper - just a carefree childhood.
“In one day you will have the same relaxation as in a month in Goa,” say the organizers of the “City of Childhood” project. Anyone here can feel like a child: play, draw, take a midday nap and take the craft home.
Throughout the whole day from 8:00 to 18:00, groups of ten people are supervised by experienced educators who do not let their charges get bored.
In addition to the traditional daily routine, to which children are accustomed and which adults have long lost the habit of, here you can try your favorite dishes from the canteen of kindergartens in the USSR: porridge, casseroles, cocoa.
Under the supervision of teachers, adults who have fallen into childhood enjoy sculpting from plasticine, singing, and doing creative work. The idyll will not be disturbed by someone's mobile phone call. Visitors' phones are taken away upon entry.
A vacation in such an establishment teaches you to take a simpler approach to life, be more confident in yourself, and gives you the opportunity to simply have a great time and reboot.
There are more and more people who want to plunge into a carefree childhood, and similar institutions already exist in Novosibirsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg. The “City of Childhood” project was invented and implemented by Novosibirsk programmer Evgeny Pyatkovsky.
“My daughter enjoys going to kindergarten. My friends and I once also discussed when we felt happy, and agreed that happiness existed a long time ago and in childhood. This is where the idea of a kindergarten for adults came from,” says Pyatkovsky.
Earlier, Evgeny Pyatkovsky launched the Anti-collector application, which blocks calls from collection agencies to debtors, and later released the Alkota application to combat the illegal sale of alcohol and the Internet project “500 natural products”.
It is noted that in Saratov women over the age of 50 are showing interest in kindergarten. In other cities, the audience is much younger: men aged 28 to 40 years and women from 23 to 30 years old.
There are such kindergartens in other countries. Actually, it was the Japanese who first came up with the idea of creating such an establishment. There are similar kindergartens without children in Germany and the USA, only there you can spend whole weeks and even stay overnight. In addition, the client is picked up in the evening by a fake parent-actor.
In adult kindergarten
What is happiness?
Evgeniy Pyatkovsky, a Novosibirsk programmer and entrepreneur, decided to “relapse into childhood.” Adults sometimes really need to disconnect from reality and throw off the burden of responsibility, at least for a while. Eat a casserole, fashion a horse out of plasticine and go, as expected, for a quiet hour in the afternoon. The reboot takes place in the “City of Childhood” kindergarten for adults.
“We once sat down with friends and started talking - what is happiness anyway?
For some it’s just eating ice cream, but for others it’s the moment of buying a new iPhone...
And you know, in the end we realized that the happiest people are at kindergarten age. After all, then you study, work, raise children... And in kindergarten you are the real one. You're carefree. And everything is fine,” this is how Evgeniy Pyatkovsky explained his idea to the “Mercy” correspondent.
Evgeniy is 36 years old, he is a programmer and entrepreneur. And he constantly comes up with a variety of social projects. The Anticollector software application he launched has been running for two years now; more than half a million people have already used it. “Literally today we released a version of this application for iPhones,” says Evgeniy. – The essence of the application is an antivirus. If a collector calls you, you tell us, we check whether this person is really engaged in collection activities. If yes, then we block him, and after that neither you nor thousands of other people will receive a call from him.”
This year Evgeniy also came up with the Alkota project. “I had an idea to activate society in the fight against alcohol abuse. We invited people to report illegal points of sale of alcohol - the program was launched throughout Russia. But our citizens are still afraid to report such information, while we have received about 200 calls.”
Is it any wonder that such an active citizen came up with another social start-up? By the way, Evgeniy was largely inspired by his two-year-old daughter. “My daughter really loves going to kindergarten, and if she is not allowed there, she will be very upset.” So a resident of Novosibirsk decided to help his fellow countrymen have a blast - not in bars, karaoke or at home in front of the TV, but over semolina porridge and drawing and sculpting. “These are not some kind of quests!” – warn the creators of the project.
Evgeny Pyatkovsky, programmer, Novosibirsk entrepreneur, author of the idea of “Cities of Childhood”
Real childhood
“City of Childhood” started last week. The unusual kindergarten occupies 100 square meters, everything here is as it should be - a playroom, a sleeping area, a kitchen.
“Among our adult children – that’s what we call our visitors – 70 percent are men, 30 percent are women,” says Evgeny Pyatkovsky. “The other day, leaving kindergarten, one of our visitors said: “It’s better to have an adult child from kindergarten than a reveler from a bar.”
The author of the project notes: if men often come here to really get away from everything, to get away from business, then women do not lose the opportunity to meet each other. The kindergarten population consists of men on average 25-40 years old and women 23-30 years old. “Who are their professions, where do they work? We never ask and we forbid journalists from filming them or communicating with them. People want to escape their everyday worries.”
“Everyone just wants to forget about everything for at least one day. By the way, we have a mandatory rule: no contact with reality from morning to evening, phones are turned off,” says Evgeniy.
By the way, discipline is monitored here too. This is expressed in the fact that citizens with a hangover, much less in a state of alcoholic intoxication, will not be accepted into kindergarten.
The group consists of up to 10 people. For one visit, lasting from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., the client pays 3 thousand rubles. “And we don’t think it’s expensive. In any average hotel, a night's stay costs the same. And here you have four full meals a day, healthy sleep, and educational games!” - notes Evgeniy.
“A spoon for mom, a spoon for dad!”
Impeccable interior authenticity
It all starts with getting to know each other. “Children, this is Ivan. He will be with you all day,” this is how the teachers introduce each participant to the group.
By the way, let us note: the teachers here are professional. Evgeniy recruited staff from real kindergartens, so the teachers have experience working with children's groups and conducting various active and educational games. But for the rest, children and adults are one and the same, Evgeniy is convinced. “We adults are just grown-up children. We are no different,” says the author of the idea.
Evgeny decided that the food in his establishment should be a real kindergarten - he wants to feel nostalgic for his childhood, Soviet times. Therefore, here the “children” are fed the well-known casserole and semolina porridge, fish cakes, and are given boiled milk. Customers, by the way, are delighted - they claim that this is how real, absolutely healthy food should be.
A mandatory item in the daily routine is quiet time. “This is just a godsend for an office worker or a businessman - they either have irregular working hours or a continuous routine. And they rarely manage to sleep during the day. So we all happily lie down to take a nap for an hour,” explains Evgeniy.
Once, Evgeniy says, he tried to make a caterpillar out of colored paper, like his daughter - they make such things in kindergarten. But he didn't do it so cleverly. I would like to! In this unusual kindergarten you can try yourself in different genres: teachers can offer a group of “children” a choice from more than 100 different games and activities. The games are chosen by the teacher depending on the age and composition of the group. It can be anything - playing town, modeling, drawing, applique, assembling castles from ordinary children's cubes... You can just play with dolls and cars. By the way, at the end of the day, all participants receive souvenirs: the same works that they made or painted in their kindergarten. Everyone will be pleased to hang their own picture in a frame over their desktop with the caption “Kolya. 35 years".
“I also experienced the role of a kindergarten student. You have no idea how great it is - all day without any responsibility! As in childhood. I was so distracted that even during the day I never smoked a cigarette - I simply forgot,” Evgeniy Pyatkovsky shared his impressions with “Mercy”. — This is better than any team building. By the way, we also held it - the other day a group came in full force, 12 people from one company. Psychologists note that it is useful for the adult psyche to relax in this way. Do you know how much laughter we have here at the end of the day?! This is such a small childhood holiday for everyone,” says Evgeniy.
A whole line of people who want to be a child has already formed in the “City of Childhood” - there are already more than 80 such adult “children”. And Evgeny Pyatkovsky is offering a franchise for his new business, and literally in the near future such kindergartens for adults will open in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Yekaterinburg... So get ready for the Festival of Obedience!
Similar projects are being implemented abroad. For example, American Michelle Joni Lapidos created an adult day care center in Brooklyn. The kindergarten's clients read, play, do creative work, have pillow fights, dress up in carnival costumes, play lotto and crocodile, hide and seek and tag, sing and recite poems, go for a walk and play in the sandbox with toys. You can sleep here directly on large soft pillows, sitting on the floor. Those who wish can talk privately with a professional psychologist. According to the owner of the kindergarten, this is a kind of psychological training for adults who are tired of their business life.
Today in “Business of the Post-Apocalypse” is the story of a Novosibirsk businessman who opened a kindergarten for adults. Respectable people hand over their mobile phones at the entrance, eat casserole all day and play children's games. And, apparently, they feel great.
“Hello, my name is Misha and I’m thirty years old.” This is roughly how every morning begins in the “City of Childhood” - a kindergarten for adults, which was opened a week ago by Novosibirsk entrepreneur Evgeny Pyatkovsky. Pupils come here at eight in the morning and leave at six in the evening - everything happens approximately the same as in a regular kindergarten. First of all, everyone gets to know each other (usually they come here for one day, so the group is formed anew every day). Then breakfast with tea and casserole, and then games and activities. Visitors make applique flowers from millet, pasta and glue, draw pictures, sculpt from plasticine, sing songs and play with toys. After classes there is lunch and a quiet hour, then an afternoon snack and games, and in the evening the whole group gathers and sums up the day. By and large, there is only one difference from a real kindergarten: at the entrance you have to take away mobile phones from all pupils.
As Evgeniy says, the evening summing up is the funniest point in the day's schedule. Guests receive their drawings and applications and laugh at them together.
According to my observations, adults draw worse than children,” says the entrepreneur. - And by the way, I am no exception. My two-year-old daughter once brought home a caterpillar made from colored paper from the garden. I tried to make the same one, and my caterpillar turned out much scarier.
Not even a month had passed since the opening of the “City of Childhood,” but by the third day of work, a queue of eighty people had signed up there, and there had never been a single time when the full group—ten people—wasn’t there in the morning. The entrepreneur is confident that interest in his kindergarten for adults will continue to grow:
“There is a child inside every person,” he reasons. - This is especially noticeable in men, of whom, by the way, we have much more than women - the ratio is approximately seventy to thirty.
Mostly, pupils aged from twenty-five to forty come to the “City of Childhood”; as a rule, fairly wealthy people who need to relax a little and relieve stress. “But the women who come to us are looking not for emotional relief, but for new acquaintances,” the entrepreneur says about his observations. “One said it straight out: “I’m more interested in meeting an adult child than some alcoholic.”
One day in kindergarten for adults costs 3,000 rubles. The price is not too high, but this pleasure cannot be called cheap either.
This is approximately the same as the daily cost of a hotel with breakfast, explains the entrepreneur. - Only they feed you four times here, not once. So I don't think it's expensive. And besides, this price allows you to cut off antisocial elements. After all, in every city there are many inadequate people who, in fact, are much more interested in taking a five-liter beer and sitting drinking while eating a cat in the basement (when asked what the cat has to do with it, Evgeniy replied that this is such an “old joke”).
The entrepreneur calls himself an ideological slacker and admits that his slogan in life is: “What can you come up with, as long as you don’t have to work.” Before opening a kindergarten for adults, he had already tried to launch several projects, some of which even became resonant. For example, the Anti-collector application, which blocked calls from collectors and initially aroused distrust not only among the collectors themselves, but also among debtors. True, in the end, as Evgeniy claims, Anti-collector nevertheless became a full-fledged business:
“At first everyone said that this was useless nonsense,” he recalls. - People on banking forums wrote that there are already many such applications and another analogue is not needed. And yet the project took off. After all, it’s not even about the idea itself, but about how to present it. For example, if you simply say “Kindergarten for adults,” who is interested? And if you present it as such an island of nostalgia for childhood, then people become curious.
The entrepreneur explains that this is the same story as with the iPhone: in fact, it’s just a phone, but for some reason people line up at six in the morning for the new model. This is because they are being sold not just a gadget, but some kind of involvement in the latest technologies, and they are presenting it in exactly this way. It’s the same with Uber: a person does not buy taxi services, but the opportunity to quickly get into a car and get to his destination without spending very much money.
“If you find such a trick, you can immediately start a cool business,” says Evgeniy. - And to find it, you need to think that people are generally ready to buy. And, of course, every idea needs to be promoted and talked about.
True, not all of Pyatkovsky’s previous projects were successful. He tried to launch the “500 Natural Products” website, through which farmers would contact buyers, and the “Alkota” application, where illegal alcohol outlets could be marked on a map so that this information would be sent to the police.
“Many of my projects died because I didn’t do much with them,” admits Evgeniy. - But the ideas themselves were actually cool. Today, many interesting projects end like this: they die because people don’t know how to monetize them, although there are ways. A simple example: I was one of those who first brought . Back then, they were presented as assistant devices for those who wanted to quit smoking, and were not exactly very popular. And now people are making a lot of money from them. They just successfully transformed the idea itself: they moved away from trying to quit smoking to smoking safely. They guessed that people don't want to quit smoking, they just want it to be less harmful. And look how this business has blossomed.
When Pyatkovsky announced that he was opening a kindergarten for adults in Novosibirsk, it immediately caused a stir: it turned out that people miss the time when teachers sent them to breakfast and quiet time, they miss those feelings. Before launching the project, the entrepreneur visited several kindergartens in his hometown: he was looking for experts who could tell him how kindergartens in Soviet times were organized. As a result, we found teachers who gave advice and helped us find manuals and recipes for the kitchen. Now specially trained educators work in the “City of Childhood”, and the work is organized according to the unified education program of the USSR.
I decided to copy the Soviet system not because it is better than others,” explains Pyatkovsky, “but because our clients were brought up in the Soviet Union under this program. If we built the work like in modern gardens, it would be strange and incomprehensible to them.
They wouldn't feel nostalgic.
The entrepreneur says that he is already planning to open kindergartens for adults in Moscow and St. Petersburg on a franchise basis and that he has also been offered to open another “City of Childhood” in Yekaterinburg.
“Before launching the project, I consulted with about a hundred acquaintances,” says Evgeniy. - And of all of them, only one told me that he would never go to “this madhouse.” But he is still a deputy, he probably already has enough of his madhouse at work. And everyone else agreed that the idea was great and told me that they themselves would be happy to come to my kindergarten.
Pyatkovsky believes that his project is something like a quest, only not for an hour, but for the whole day. Even if visitors feel awkward at first, after half an hour they get used to the role and begin to feel like children, forgetting that they have an “adult” life.
True, there is a sad moment in all this. When I ask the entrepreneur how he came up with the idea for such a project, he says:
“Once we were sitting with friends and discussing what happiness was and whether we had ever had it. We came to the conclusion that it was possible to be happy only when there were no worries and we were not responsible for anything. But, starting from school, we constantly owe something to someone: lessons, lectures, exams, work, when we have to be responsible for every decision. And we realized that a person can only be truly happy in kindergarten.
