Blind Parenting: But It Feels Like You Can

Recently, a baby from Missouri was was taken away from her parents and only returned after 57 days.  A hospital nurse had decided that the parents, who were blind, could not care for their baby appropriately.

[My father is legally blind. While that affected me in many ways, my mother was in charge of daily care.]

Blind parents have special challenges when caring for their children. The website Parenting without Sight reassures both parents and skeptical professionals, giving practical tips from experienced parents.

• Infancy. The best way to care for a baby, whether you are sighted or not, is to keep baby close and learn his cues.
• Diaper rash. A blind parent won’t notice redness, an early sign of diaper rash, although bumps can be felt. A blind mother can be vigilant about applying ointment to prevent diaper rash.
• Transport. A sling is essential, to keep one hand free for a white cane or guide dog.
• Toddler safety. Just as in infancy, keeping the child close is key. A blind mother can train children to hold hands outside, and place bells on clothing or shoes to alert them when they are getting into something.
• Illness. Talking thermometers and raised markings on medicine cups are useful tools for blind parents. A sighted helper can fill up a few syringes, to be used as needed.
• Learning. Blocks with raised letters, or magnets can be used to teach letters. There are children’s books including both Braille and printed text, for blind parents to read aloud. If blind parents have a system for keeping track of colors of clothes and other items, they can teach their children too.
• School. All parents of kindergarteners and first graders can get overwhelmed by the amount of printed material that comes home. Children of blind parents may need a helper until they can read  homework to their parents when necessary.

I enjoyed this passage from Parenting without Sight:

Gary Wunder of Columbia, Missouri, is the father of a grown daughter. A young blind man looking forward to fatherhood in a few months asked him for his advice. Gary’s thoughtful response contains wisdom for all blind parents and for the people who seek to understand and learn from us:

My advice is first to enjoy your children at every stage. They’ll pass from one stage to the next, and, as much as you’ll love watching them grow, you’ll still miss the child of a month ago. My daughter Missy is twenty-five and working in a highly responsible job after getting her college degree. I love this Missy, and at the same time I miss the Missy who sat with me in the rocking chair, the one who rode in front of me in a Snugli as I walked her to sleep, the child who listened to me as if I were an oracle when I was saying something important to her. I miss the kid who, learning to think on her own, realized I wasn’t all-wise and didn’t know nearly as much as she once thought I did; and I miss the child who later, as the pendulum swung, again came to realize I knew a bit more than she had thought I knew and flattered me by once again coming for advice. I miss the day we went to buy her a car, and she thought I was the smartest bargainer in the world, and then the drive in which she asked me, “How am I doing, Dad?” and I said, “I can’t really supervise you on this one,” and she said, “Yeah, I know, but it feels like you can.”

Image source: Nebraska Federation of the Blind

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Autism Diagnosis: Dreaming a New Dream

This is a guest post by Victoria Feinerman.

When our son, Z, was 13 months old, we took him to the pediatrician. We were concerned that he had only learned a couple of words, never pointed to items of interest, and failed to look at things pointed out to him. The doctor replied that we should return when Z was 18 months old, to give him a chance to learn more language.

Time passed, and there was no progress. Z stopped using the few words he knew. By 17 months, we were convinced that something was terribly wrong, and we returned to the doctor and told him we could wait no longer. He referred us to Hitpatchut HaYeled (Child Development), where a pediatric neurologist informed us that our son has a communication problem and referred us to further testing at another Hitpatchut HaYeled branch.

After our meeting with the neurologist, we came home and looked up “communication problems” online. And as we read the description of autism, our world turned upside down. The kid described online – that was our kid. Now I think of that time as the beginning of mourning period number one.

A month later, the pediatric neurologist at the new “Hitpatchut HaYeled” informed us that our child likely had autism, confirming our fears. This was the start of mourning period number two. A month after that, we had a final diagnosis: Autistic Disorder. So started mourning period number threee.

Why all these mourning periods? Sure, it’s sad when your child is diagnosed with an incurable lifelong disability, but mourning? No one died, right?

Wrong. Someone did die: The kid we thought we had. He is gone forever. The kid who we thought would run around with friends at the park, attend our older kids’ school, go to summer camp, participate in school plays . . . He’s gone.

Yes, he was an imaginary child who never existed other than in our minds, but we believed in him and loved him, and upon his departure we mourned him.

And so, mourning, we started our hectic new lives. We continued working, parenting, running a household, and meeting our responsibilities to extended family and friends, while going to a never-ending series of follow-up tests and appointments. We traversed the red tape of Bituach Leumi (Social Security), the tax authorities, the municipality, and the Welfare Ministry. We had a team of five therapists start a therapy program in our home, 30 hours a week.

It was particularly difficult to hear therapists praising Z’s progress, when the skills he’d learned were basic things that any regular kid could do. We were expected to celebrate Z’s ability to hand someone a spoon when asked to do so. Certainly the kid we thought we had could have done that.

We continued mourning for around a year. But something happened as time wore on. We let go of the kid we thought we had, and we gradually came to know the kid we actually do have – and discovered how wonderful and special and precious he is.

We celebrate each new skill he acquires, each step he makes towards independence and success, without comparing his achievements to those that our thought-we-had kid would have accomplished in the blink of a nonexistent eye.

I think most parents discover at some point that their kid is not the person that they had fantasized – a famous doctor, a renowned scientist, the next prime minister. A child is who he or she is, not who their parents dream they’ll be. We just discovered this sooner and more dramatically. This is not to say that we have no dreams for our son, just that they have changed.

Our wish for Z is to be all that he can be, to fulfill his potential. And who is to say that his potential is any less spectacular than that of the kid we thought we had, that figment of our imagination who never actually existed to begin with?

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Tipat Chalav: What New Parents Need to Know

On Twitter, @mrsroth mentioned how a nurse handed her 18-month-old a cup and spoon. The little girl started to “stir” with the spoon, but failed that developmental task because she was supposed to pretend to eat from the bowl.

Everyone loves to complain about Tipat Chalav, the network of well-baby clinics run by Israel’s health ministry. Sometimes the staff gives silly suggestions, or even dangerous ones. And nothing is more upsetting to an anxious new mother than having her baby “fail” one of Tipat Chalav’s many tests.

Overall, Tipat Chalav does its job very well. It’s important for new parents to understand Tipat Chalav’s strengths and limitations.

Tipat Chalav has several key roles:

1. Weigh, measure and examine the baby. This is to ensure that  baby is getting enough to eat and has no underlying health issues. Even educated and experienced parents don’t pick up every problem. And if your baby has never been weighed, you won’t have a baseline to tell the doctor if something comes up later.
2. Give immunizations.
3. Share updated health and safety guidelines. These include vitamins, breastfeeding and bottle-feeding information, when to start solids, safety recommendations, and more. The Israel Health Ministry writes up the guidelines, many of which come via the World Health Organization. Many Tipat Chalav nurses have even taken courses in breastfeeding, but the quality of their advice varies.
4. Test the baby’s development. This includes physical and cognitive ability, communication, hearing, and eyesight.
5. Schedule regular appointments with the resident pediatrician.

In addition, Tipat Chalav provides services for women during pregnancy and in the post-partum period, including birth control.

Tipat Chalav’s goal is to prevent babies and their families from falling though the cracks. That’s why there’s one in nearly every neighborhood. In addition to spotting medical concerns, they involve social services when they suspect abuse or neglect. This is a good thing, even though it means some parents will be falsely accused.

One problem with Tipat Chalav is that the nurses administer standard tests, and they expect standard answers. If your baby starts to drop in the weight percentiles, some nurses are alarmed even when everything else is fine.

New mothers can be sensitive to the slightest criticism. If the nurse finds something “wrong” with the baby, you don’t have to act on it. But because they see so many children of the same age, they may pick up on things a mother might not notice.

If you’re not sure whether the concern is justified, you can say that you will check it out with your doctor. If you report that your doctor said the the baby is fine, there isn’t much more the nurse can say. You can also try to see a different nurse in the future.

The most important thing a Tipat Chalav nurse can do is to make parents feel good about their children. This is doubly true with mothers of new babies. I’ll never forget the time I took my son for a blood test, when he was about 11 months old. He was flirting and “joking” with the nurse. She was so enchanted she called over another nurse to see. There’s a huge difference when you walk into the clinic and are greeted by someone happy to see you and your baby, not looking down a checklist expecting to find something wrong.

Are you satisfied with your Tipat Chalav? Do they accomplish what they are supposed to, or do they just make parents overly anxious? What tips can you give to new parents?

Photo source: MollyPop

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An Insider’s View of Tipat Chalav

Modern Tribe has some great Jewish Gifts for all occasions.

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An Alternative to Adler: Parenting Answers from Dr. Gordon Neufeld

Note: I revised the wording in several places at the request of Shoshana Hayman.

Several years ago I reviewed Hold On to Your Kids by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a clinical psychologist specializing in attachment at all ages. Dr. Neufeld is in Israel thanks to Shoshana Hayman, Faculty Member of the Neufeld Institute and founder of the Life Center. She organized a question and answer session with Dr. Neufeld yesterday in Tel Aviv.

Below is a summary of some of the questions and answers, which reflect my understanding of Dr. Neufeld’s words. I suggest reading the book review and referring to his books and website for more information.

1. How can people who work with parents or teachers transmit the importance of attachment and connection?
   Dr. Neufeld: The best thing we can do is to help them open their eyes to the child. Once the parent or teacher can see the child from a different perspective, the relationship, and the behavior, improve. If they ask why it worked, we can explain more about the theory.
2. How can parents implement the ideas in your book? It seems too challenging for many parents.
   Dr. Neufeld: There is a difference between the book and the paradigm.  The book is written for a very specific audience, who like to read books about parenting theory. [MiI: It's fascinating, but long, and dense at times.] The paradigm, which is used during counseling, is appplicable to all.  For example, when I work with a 14-year-old new mother, who is addicted to drugs and doesn’t know who her father is, I don’t give her a copy of the book. Instead I do something that helps all new mothers—help her be aware of her baby’s whereabouts and sensitive to his cues.  Teaching parenting skills won’t help when there is no attachment. Parenting skills follow attachment, because the mother will want to learn how to meet her child’s needs. Attachment, not skills, make a mother out of a girl.
3. Will your approach work in cases of physical abuse?
   Dr. Neufeld: Yes.  If parents have good intentions, can feel remorse about what happened and want to change, my approach can help a parent see the situation and the child in a different light and learn to respond appropriately. But if there is cruelty for its own sake, or the parent is blinded to his own behaviour, we would need to add to that a more direct form of intervention to heal the parent first. But if there is cruelty for its own sake, a more direct form of intervention is required.
4. What about cases of sexual abuse within the family, say a father or older brother is abusing the child?
   Dr. Neufeld: Removing the child from the home, as a first step, as is commonly done in the US, is counterproductive.  There are two parts to the abuse, one is the physical side, and one is the emotional side, the damaged attachment. Severing the connection with the abuser means that the child has lost the only attachment he has, even though it’s toxic.  That leaves the child hopeless because grieving and healing can only be done within the context of a healthy and operating attachment.  I recommend, at the first suspicion of sexual abuse, to find a way for the child to build a healthy attachment with someone else close to the family like an aunt or a grandmother. This attachment should gradually replace the toxic attachment, until the child feels safe enough to share what has happened. [To illustrate, Dr. Neufeld leaned on one foot and then the other, to illustrate how the child transfers his connection.]  Once a healthy attachment is in place then there can be legal inervention as neccessary, and removal of the toxic parent if required.
5. What about anorexia?
   Dr. Neufeld: Anorexia is closely related to attachment. As we know, food is a symbol for love and affection. Rebuilding the attachment with the parents can be an important part of the therapy, but anorexia is a dangerous illness and hospitalization must take priority over psychological therapy.
6. Why are so few people following this approach, and what can we do to encourage more people to adopt it?
   Dr. Neufeld: The approach I use is intuitive.  There are many therapists around the world that are intuitive and use similar approaches.  The problem is that what is intuitive doesn’t have words and can’t be passed on.  I’ve created the words to make conscious of what is intuitive, to create a collective consciousness for all using this approach, so we can join together to change the way children and understood and treated.
   In the workshops and courses that I’ve given, I’ve found many people already use this approach, but they didn’t realize it. They say I’ve given them a language and terminology to teach it to others.
7. What is the main difference between your approach and the existing approaches?
   Dr. Neufeld: The existing approaches are behavioral.  They focus on form, not development.  Skinner, Adler (popular in Israel), Locke, Watson and other behaviorists all recognized the importance of self-worth and attachment. The problem with their approach is that they advocate withholding these things until the child behaves appropriately. The children have to earn their attachment thorough good behavior. But children need to be flooded with affection and attachment from the beginning. If you withhold it you might get the desired behavior but you also arrest the development of the child’s full potential.

Dr. Neufeld also spoke about therapy. Therapies that focus on fixing what is wrong with the parent harm attachment, because the parent pays attention to him or herself and has stopped paying attention to the relationship. When parents start to look at their children and connect with them, they will work on themselves at the same time. In some cases, the parents do need individual therapy before they can rebuild a strong relationship with their children.

Dr. Neufeld concluded by saying that some people believe that God created us so we could raise children. But he sees that as a joke. Rather, God gave us children so that we, the parents, can grow up.

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Orthodox Girls and Eating Disorders

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Orthodox Girls and Eating Disorders

The Washington Times published an article on eating disorders in the Orthodox Jewish community. Julia Duin writes:

Staff members at Renfrew, where 12 percent of the patients are Jewish, said they noticed an uptick in Orthodox clients in recent years.

The main pressure, they said, is on the Jewish mother, who is responsible for keeping a kosher kitchen (a mammoth amount of work), providing a generous Sabbath dinner and dessert for not only her household, but various guests who wander in at any point during a Friday evening.
Jewish holidays are the worst, they said, as the amounts of food required take weeks to prepare. A woman’s worth often rests on the quality of her cuisine.

Well, I may not like it but there is a lot of truth to that last line.

The Orthodox Union got so concerned with this trend that it produced a film, “Hungry to be Heard,” warning viewers to watch for signs of these afflictions, particularly among teenage girls who feel their looks aren’t good enough.
In Orthodoxy, I was told by Adrienne Ressler, one of the panelists, the Orthodox girl wants to be chosen “by the best groom and by the best groom’s family.”
“So the pressure is to be very thin.”
In some cases, the prospective groom’s family not only wants to know the girl’s dress size, but that of her mother, so they can project what the potential bride will look like in 18 years.
“Sometimes, they put a girl’s health records online,” she said. “It’s like buying a horse. I think women can be silenced in that community. The eating disorder is the red flag.”

Many factors lead to eating disorders in the Orthodox community, and most of them are universal. I think the best thing mothers can do for their daughter is to exercise and eat wisely and share why it’s important. But when women talk about diets, and complain about the way they look, their daughters (and sons) get the message.

Related: Putting Food in Perspective (at Cooking Manager)

Teens, Sex and Eating Disorders: Interview with the Therapy Doc

Photo credit:Roland

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Are Cribs a Safe Place for Babies?

During our discussion on the safety of co-sleeping, I pointed out that cribs carry risks as well. They are constantly being recalled.

I’m not saying that putting a baby to sleep in a crib is riskier than co-sleeping. So much depends on the situation. Also, it’s hard to gather accurate statistics, because we don’t know what percentage of children co-sleep, mainly because parents who do it are afraid to admit it. And children often alternate between cribs and their parents’ beds.

So here is the latest baby furniture news:  Cribs with drop-down sides may be outlawed by Congress.

Bobby was one of at least 32 infants and toddlers since 2000 who suffocated or were strangled in a drop-side crib, which has a side that moves up and down to allow parents to lift children from the cribs more easily than cribs with fixed sides. Drop-sides, around for decades and probably slept in by many of today’s parents, are suspected in an additional 14 infant fatalities during that time.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates cribs, has warned about the problem. Its chairman, Inez Tenenbaum, has pledged to ban the manufacture and sale of cribs by the end of the year with a new performance standard that would make fixed-side cribs mandatory. It could be several months into 2011 before becoming effective.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is preparing a law to ban the manufacture and use of drop-side cribs.

I predict that changing crib designs will lead to fewer babies sleeping in them. It’s not easy to lift a heavy infant in and out of a crib with a high railing, especially in the middle of the night. Babies will be more likely to fall, too. Parents will be forced to buy the newest crib models, whether or not they can afford them.

I guess the next step is a law prohibiting parents from putting babies to sleep in a crib with drop-down sides, and prosecuting parents for doing so.

But who knew, all those years, that we risked our kids’ lives by having them sleep in cribs.

Photo credit: Afroswede

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