The Maxabella Family (from www.maxabellaloves.blogspot.com) by Tim Coulson (www.timcoulson.blogspot.com)

I LOVE Twitter. It can instantly connect us to so much exceptional and relevant information. This afternoon I checked in and Dr. Marilyn Price-Mitchell had shared a link to an interesting article about children and their needs. I have reprinted it here in full and used bold to highlight the very best bits.

Adults Must Teach Children Nurturing Skills

This summary is adapted from "Adults Must Teach Children Nurturing Skills" an essay published in the April 1995 issue of American Academy of Pediatrics News. For further information, please contact the author: John D. Walker, M.D., Texas Youth Commission, 4900 North Lamar Blvd., Austin, Texas 78765
For ten years I have worked in the "trenches" of a hospital emergency department, functioning as a kind of family doctor for the forgotten victims of our violent culture.  In that capacity, I have cared for an endless parade of tragically torn and battered human beings - mostly children and young adults - who continue to suffer from injuries that are, to an astonishing degree, preventable.  Something's missing.  Can we, as a society, be content with waiting at the bottom of the cliff for children to fall off and then trying to pick up the pieces of their broken lives?  In these times of managed health care, it's easy to become preoccupied with counting the number of stretchers at the bottom of the cliff instead of focusing on educating ourselves and the next generation in how to build the fences to keep children from falling off in the first place.


Can there be any more far-reaching preventive mission than teaching children the art and science of nurturing - how to be good mothers, good fathers, good husbands and good wives? Mountains of research point to the link between inadequate nurturing and the epidemic of behavioral health problems in our society - irresponsible sexual behavior, unwanted children, intergenerational welfare dependency, child abuse and neglect, crime, violence, homicide, suicide, substance abuse, alcohol-related automobile "accidents," and so on.

Long before Sir William Osler established a higher standard for the medical profession, "No longer is our highest aim to cure, but to prevent disease," the Hippocratic tenet, "to help, or at least to do no harm" left no doubt as to the ethical duty of physicians to, if at all possible, prevent harm. Dr. Vincent Felitti and his coworkers have raised the bar even higher for our profession, by establishing a dose-response relationship (Sir Austin Bradford Hill's 5th criterion of causality) between childhood abuse and household dysfunction and many of the leading causes of death in adults. This biological gradient (demonstrated previously with cigarette smoking and lung cancer) provides us, as physicians, with strong evidence of causality, and an ethical duty to remove these stumbling blocks from the path of the physical, emotional, social, intellectual, ethical and spiritual development of children.

Jack C. Westman, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, estimates that the next generation of incompetently parented children will cost America more than 20 trillion dollars.

In Yuqui: Forest Nomads in a Changing World, anthropologist Allyn Maclean Stearman describes an isolated, remnant band of foragers in the Bolivian rain forest who became separated from their main tribe in the 16th century and gradually, over the course of several generations, lost much of their cultural heritage - even their ability to build a fire.  Like the Yuqui, we are in danger of losing the art of nurturing our children.

It's time to develop a national certification program in basic nurturing skills. Driver's education has become routine. Do we care more about our cars than our kids? Consider the following:

A cornucopia of nurturing information, harvested from the fields of epidemiology, health promotion and child development, has already been assembled within the pages of the American Academy of Pediatrics' excellent three-volume series of child-care books.

During a student's formative school years, we can provide opportunities for the daily practice of basic skills fundamental to healthy nurturing habits.

In a classroom setting, students can participate in simulations, an approach used in the hightly successful Pediatric Life Support courses developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Assocaition.

Using volunteer pediatricians, nurses, parents, grandparents, teachers, and peers trained to act as instructors, schools can bring children as close to the "real thing" as possible, and incorporate these essential nurturing fundamentals into the K-12 educational experience.

Simulated-encounter training refresher sessions can be given like booster immunizations during well-child office visits, while families wait to be seen by their health care providers.

If we can train the best fighter pilots in the world, there is no reason why we cannot equip a future generation of world-class parents with state of the art knowledge and skills so that, before they are even capable of conceiving a child, they are literally experts in the science of nurturing children.

We must begin long before children even come into the world, preparing future parents with an appreciation of not only the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual developmental needs of children, but also an understanding of their higher ethical and spiritual needs. First among these must be what Albert Schweitzer called "a reverence for life."

Building on this strong foundation, we can then instill in our youth, early on, a desire to do what is best for children. This will require a concerted effort by peers, parents, teachers, members of the community, and leaders of society - consistently imparting through the example of their own lives the principle of nurturing children as the highest preventive priority.

We must nurture children not only in principle, but also in practice. We must develop a healthy intolerance of socially toxic environmental influences that are harmful to children. This integrity must be reflected in the calendars and budgets of our homes, in the policies and programs of the workplace, and in the laws and customs of our society.

By teaching children not only how to count, but more importantly, what counts, we will give them an indispensable preventive inoculation against the epidemic of society's behavioral health problems.

There has been much debate about how best to spend our health care dollars. I might be wrong, but it seems that increasing future parents' nurturing capacity is the best investment we can make.



As I read through this article I found myself thinking, "What a tragedy that so many parents simply don't get it. What a travesty that it should even be discussed that a nationwide system might need to be considered to teach children what their parents aren't."

A friend of mine worked for child protection services. I think it's an indictment on our society that we need a department called "child protection", but I digress. I recall speaking to him about a particularly difficult day. He said to me, "I just can not understand the excuses these people give as they try to explain how they broke their three year-old's arms".

Clearly there are parents who are not teaching their children what they need to know, and the cycle of damage continues from one generation to the next. But there are many who are not abusive, or even "bad", but who still fail to pass on meaningful and useful relationship and nurturing skills.

... but what do you think? Should we be teaching children the science of relationships as part of our children's school curriculum? Please share your thoughts below.