Cissy's note: I am a huge fan of the way @Claudia Gold works with those of us Parenting with ACEs. The first time I read her writing I relaxed. She was speaking with and for parents not about or at us. Unfortunately, her approach is rare. Fortunately, she just launched a new project she's been dreaming of for years. I love the way she supports all families and how she centers the role of all parents in the lives of all children - especially those - not all except those impacted by ACEs. Dr. Gold was nice enough to participate in the Parenting with ACEs chat series and here's a summary of her empathy infused wisdom, as well as some quotes by her and others with learned or lived expertise about parenting with ACEs.
Here are excerpts from a recent article by Hannah Van Sickle published in the Berkshire Edge.
Pittsfield — Dr. Claudia Gold has made a career of thinking, in a big way, about how to raise healthy children. A pediatrician and writer with a longstanding interest in addressing children’s mental health care in a preventive model, Gold has practiced general and behavioral pediatrics for 25 years. She currently specializes in early childhood mental health and is the director of the Hello It’s Me Project, a community-based initiative to promote healthy parent-infant relationships from birth. If all goes according to plan, the project, which launched in South County two years ago, will make its debut in Pittsfield later this month.
“[To] get things going in a healthy way from the very beginning is not the end of the story,” said Gold, whose primary aim is to empower new parents not only when their babies are born, but also within a framework that will support them going forward. The goal is to bolster confidence and position parents to support their children’s subsequent development. “[The goal is to] shift the conversation so the authority is with the parent to know what they need,” Gold explained, which means giving every parent a voice. “It’s very simple,” she says.
The Hello It’s Me Project shines a spotlight on these tender new relationships, investing resources around the birth of a baby with the long-term goal of building a healthy community from the bottom up. While the project will serve the entire community, it is particularly well-suited to support parent-infant relationships impacted by the growing opioid crisis. While the program has particular benefits for an opioid-addicted parent and their unregulated baby, Gold is quick to point out that “It’s for everyone.”
“Everyone struggles in their own unique way,” Gold explained, which means “getting [all parents] on firm footing from the beginning is helpful.” As if parenting were not difficult enough, it has become increasingly taboo for new parents to give voice to the fact that being a parent is a daunting job, one that persists long after your baby outgrows diapers and afternoon naps. In the 1980s, renowned pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton (who died last March at the age of 99) developed the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale to organize his observations of the newborn infant’s role in development of the emerging parent-child relationship. He recognized that each baby comes into the world with unique qualities together with a tremendous capacity for connection and communication.
The Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) system, developed from the NBAS, is a clinical relationship-building tool that came to Berkshire County in 2017–18. In a program under the auspices of the Austen Riggs Center in close collaboration with Berkshire United Way and funded in large part by the John and Geraldine Weil Memorial Charitable Foundation, maternity nurses from Fairview Hospital in Great Barrington and a range of practitioners who work with young infants and families in South County gathered together over two days to learn the NBO. Gold, who continues to play a central role in implementation of the South County NBO project, is now bringing the program in an expanded form to Pittsfield.
“The community engagement piece is to bring all the players together—early interventionists, lactation consultants, anyone who might be feeling overwhelmed by the number of families who are struggling,” Gold explained. In short? “It’s not just maternity nurses,” she emphasized, of the myriad individuals necessary to promote healthy parent-infant relationships going forward. A set of 18 neurobehavioral observations, the NBO protects time for nonjudgmental listening to parents and infant together, literally offering space to make room for this new person in the family. Central to the NBO is the idea that, for parents, mistakes in reading a baby’s signals are not only inevitable but also necessary. The real takeaway? Recognizing that growth happens in the reconnection.
Read more of this article by Hannah Van Sickle published in the Berkshire Edge.
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