A few years ago, I would have looked at this headline — Los Angeles County Jail moms can provide breast milk for their kids in lactation pilot program — and thought: “Awww. How nice of the jail staff to implement this program.”
Now, after years of being steeped in research about childhood adversity and how babies need that vital attachment to their moms to have a healthy start to life, my immediate reaction is: “What the hell are they thinking?”
The story explains how a woman gave birth to a son while she was in jail on a charge of identify theft. Her baby was taken away from her and given to a caregiver, who came by the jail every day to pick up the breast milk pumped by the mom. A spokesperson for the LA County Sheriff’s Department says that the department started the program because it wants to ensure that “both baby and mother have a bright future.”
Well, by not keeping mom and baby together, they put a big ding in that bright future.
Patience, Jane, I say. Patience. Once the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department staff members learn about the science and consequences of childhood adversity, they might figure out how to keep moms and babies together, such as this prison in Bedford Hills, N.Y., did.
Many people I’ve interviewed describe their reaction to learning about this new understanding of human development in similar ways. When former Lincoln High School Principal Jim Sporleder learned about the epidemiology of ACEs and the neurobiology of toxic stress, he said that he'd "been doing everything wrong” when it came to disciplining kids in his school in Walla Walla, WA, and then he and his staff created the first trauma-informed high school in the U.S. Evangelical Christian pastor Dave Lockridge’s response was: “I’ve been doing everything wrong when it comes to helping my most troubled parishioners,” and then he put together a workbook and course that combines the epidemiology of ACEs, the neurobiology of toxic stress and Bible studies.
So, to walk the talk — of taking a trauma-informed, resilience-building approach to integrating this knowledge in our communities — we at ACEs Connection Network educate, engage, activate people and organizations to use this new understanding of human development (and support communities who are doing the same), and celebrate the successes they enjoy as a result of integrating this knowledge. And we practice patience (and mindfulness) as we do so. We know most people, when given the opportunity, grok this new understanding, want to use it, and never want to go back to the old ways. And we know it takes time to spread the word.
This question may seem a little out of left field, but bear with me: What did you think the first time you heard that, when people in the 1700s needed a tooth pulled, they went to a barber? Barber-surgeons were an institution until the early 1800s. (In fact, barber-surgeons were an integral part of society for hundreds of years.) Nowadays, replete as we are with highly trained dentists equipped with high-tech tools and anesthesia, we think that going to a barber-surgeon is….well….barbaric (I know the two aren’t related…just couldn’t resist).
If we’re determined, our grandchildren will look back on our institutions…the prisons and jails that separate babies from their mothers, the schools that put seven-year-olds in handcuffs and suspend them, child welfare systems that wait to punish instead of intervening early to help families, the doctors that never ask patients about their ACEs….and say, “What the hell were they thinking?”
If we’re really lucky, they might even think that we were barbaric.
P.S. If anyone has a contact in the LA County Sheriff’s Department, will you send them this? — The Price They Pay: Protecting the Mother-Child Relationship Through the Use of Prison Nurseries and Residential Parenting Programs, Anne E. Jbara, Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Indiana Law Journal.
Thanks!
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