Every Tuesday and Thursday, Dave Whitlow walks into the neonatal intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU with nothing more than his time, his warmth, and a simple mission: make sure the tiniest patients fighting their biggest battles never feel alone.
He is not a doctor. He is not a nurse. He is a volunteer cuddler, and he has been doing it for eight years.
At 73 years old, Whitlow holds between five and eight premature babies per visit, some weighing under two pounds. Before he picks up each child, he gowns and gloves up, leaves his phone outside the unit, and gives the baby his full, undivided attention. Before he leaves each one, he whispers the same six words into their ear: grow strong, grow smart, grow kind.
“It’s the best gig I’ve ever had,” Whitlow told CBS 6 News. “It just feels right.”
The Man Behind the Mission
Dave Whitlow spent more than four decades as a local government manager before retiring. He tried walking dogs at a local animal shelter. He helped at the food bank. He was looking for somewhere he could make a real difference, and he found it in the most unexpected place.
“I was scared to death at first,” he admitted. The babies are fragile. The monitors are intimidating. The stakes feel impossibly high. But Whitlow learned, adapted, and stayed. Eight years later, he cannot imagine leaving.
A father of two and grandfather of three, Whitlow brings something to the NICU that medicine alone cannot provide: presence. He does not rush. He does not multitask. He simply holds each baby, watches their breathing, listens to the monitors, and whispers words of encouragement that the infants cannot yet understand, but their nervous systems can feel.
“I pretty much just want to be with them,” he said.
A Family He Never Expected
Whitlow describes his role in the NICU as extending beyond the clinical. He supports not just the babies, but the families sitting vigil beside incubators, parents who have been awake for days, who are terrified and exhausted and desperate for reassurance that their child will not be alone when they have to step out.
“The support and spiritual needs of the family and the staff, it all kind of gets tied together here,” Whitlow said.
For parents of premature babies, handing their child to a volunteer cuddler requires an enormous act of trust. That trust, once given, tends to become one of the most meaningful gifts those parents describe receiving during one of the hardest experiences of their lives.
Why Human Touch Matters for Premature Babies
What Whitlow does is not just emotionally meaningful, it is medically significant. Research from Penn Medicine’s Chester County Hospital shows that human touch plays a critical role in the development and recovery of premature infants and that distressed babies who received less physical contact in a NICU had measurably slower brain maturation than those who received regular human touch.
Premature babies spend their earliest weeks or months in an environment that is, by necessity, defined by clinical intervention. They are connected to monitors, fed through tubes, and surrounded by the sounds and lights of a busy medical unit. Human touch, the kind that comes from being held, gently rocked, and spoken to, counteracts the stress that the environment creates and activates developmental processes that cannot be triggered any other way.
The benefits of positive touch for premature babies include increased stability in vital statistics, faster weight gain, shorter hospital stays, better pain tolerance, improved sleep, and stronger immune systems. One study found that babies with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome who participated in a volunteer cuddling program had hospital stays that were six days shorter than those who did not. Six days in a NICU represents an enormous difference in medical outcomes, in family stress, and in cost.
The science connecting early human contact to long-term neurological development is part of a broader picture of how the body and brain develop in the earliest weeks of life. Research into how physical and mental health are intertwined continues to produce findings that challenge what medicine once treated as separate domains, and the NICU cuddler program sits at exactly that intersection.
A Movement Quietly Growing Across the Country
Dave Whitlow is not alone. Volunteer cuddler programs exist at hospitals across the United States, and the model has been expanding steadily as more institutions recognize both the clinical value and the community-building power of bringing trained volunteers into the NICU.
Among the hospitals running cuddler programs are Duke Health in North Carolina, Texas Children’s Hospital, the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee, UnityPoint Health in Iowa, the Baby Buddies program at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester, New York. NewYork-Presbyterian’s Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital has been running a cuddler program since 2011, with its first volunteer, an 81-year-old woman named Joan, still active a decade later, as documented by Upworthy in its coverage of the NICU cuddler movement.
The programs vary in their specifics. Some require seven hours of orientation with a nurse, followed by four hours shadowing a child life specialist. Volunteers learn how nurses handle the babies, how to read monitors, when to reposition an infant whose oxygen saturation has dipped, and how to provide comfort without overstimulating a nervous system that is not yet ready for a full sensory load.
The training turns an instinctive act of holding a baby into a caring one that is both emotionally genuine and medically informed. That combination is what makes the programs work. The same convergence of human compassion and evidence-based practice is reshaping how medicine approaches conditions once considered untreatable, from the way researchers are now rethinking Alzheimer’s prevention to the way hospitals are rethinking what healing actually requires.
What Retirement Can Look Like
There is another dimension to Dave Whitlow’s story that deserves attention, one that speaks to something larger than the NICU, larger even than the babies he holds.
Whitlow is 73. He is retired. And he has found, in the final chapter of a long career, a sense of purpose so clear and so sustaining that he describes his volunteer work as the best thing he has ever done.
That is not a small thing. Research on aging consistently identifies purpose and social connection as among the strongest predictors of healthy cognitive and physical aging. People who maintain meaningful engagement with their communities after retirement, who have somewhere to be, someone who needs them, a role that matters, live longer, report higher well-being, and show slower rates of cognitive decline than those who disengage.
Volunteer cuddling is, for many of the people who do it, a form of medicine taken as much for themselves as for the babies they hold. It is low in physical demand. It is high in emotional reward. It offers routine, community, and a daily reminder that showing up simply being present, is enough to change someone’s life.
The question of how populations age, and what social structures support or undermine healthy aging, is reshaping everything from healthcare systems to economic planning and stories like Whitlow’s point toward one part of the answer that does not require a policy intervention or a pharmaceutical breakthrough. It requires only the willingness to show up for others in ways that the market does not reward and the headlines rarely notice.
The Six Words
Every baby Dave Whitlow holds receives the same farewell. Before he sets them back down, before he removes his gown and gloves and steps back out into the rest of the world, he leans close and whispers.
Grow strong. Grow smart. Grow kind.
“It’s important to me to think that this is what I want from people in general,” Whitlow said.
He does not know which of the thousands of babies he has held will remember the warmth of those moments. None of them is old enough to form explicit memories. But the research on early touch and neurological development suggests that the body keeps its own record that being held, being spoken to, being treated as worthy of time and attention in the most vulnerable moments of life leaves a mark that outlasts any conscious recollection.
Dave Whitlow shows up twice a week, every week, for babies who cannot ask for him and cannot thank him. He does it because it feels right. He does it because they need someone. He does it because, as he puts it, this is the best gig he has ever had.
And somewhere in a neonatal intensive care unit in Richmond, Virginia, a baby weighing less than two pounds is being held by a 73-year-old man who whispers the same six words to every child he meets and means every one of them.
