By James Peters and David Gordon
As a child, an area woman had to deal with a brain injury from a car crash that left her facing lifelong depression and short-term memory loss. She has two children and, during those pregnancies, she had to stop taking her anti-depressant medications.
This made it a challenge to be the mother she wanted to be, after the birth of her first child. The father, meanwhile, had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) plus a tendency toward violence, which resulted in his being in and out of jail.
The mother’s younger child showed symptoms as an infant of failure to thrive (FTT), which is a term used by pediatricians to indicate insufficient weight gain or inappropriate weight loss. Because of this, the mother was at risk of having her baby removed from her home.
Enter Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin (CHW) Community Services.
Mary Froehlich, child and family service specialist for the CHW, worked with this mother to overcome the challenges she was facing in trying to be a good parent.
“She loves her children and wants them to do well,” Froelich said, “but has these barriers.”
Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin has no medical facility in Eau Claire but operates several community support programs here. Two of them – the Building Families program and the Child and Family Counseling program – are supported in part by United Way through its Successful Children’s network and its Community Health Initiative, respectively.
The Child and Family Counseling program focuses on mental health, while the Building Families program provides education on parenting skills and how best to encourage healthy childhood development. Often during Building Families program home visits, the instructions turn out to be basic encouragements.
“One of the things is teaching them to talk to [their] child and play with them,” Froehlich said.
For example, Froelich showed this mother how, when feeding her baby, she should hold and snuggle her son and talk to him. After a month of working with the mother on key concepts to encourage her baby’s emotional and cognitive development, Froelich said the child showed a measurable amount of improvement.
When the mother’s older child, age two, started showing signs of deficits in speech development, Froelich stepped in again. She worked with the mother to help her begin reading to the toddler, an effort that was initially challenging because the mother has difficulty reading. Froelich explained how the mother could just ‘picture read’ to her child and talk about what’s in the pictures.
The father’s PTSD remains an additional challenge in the household, but Kristine Parkins, community services manager in Eau Claire for the CHW, remains optimistic that he also wants to do right by his children and be a good father. She noted that Building Families is “a voluntary program, and they continue to let Mary come and work with them.”
Both Parkins and Froelich admit that this case represents some extreme adversity, but said they still have hopes of success.
“The good news with that is, these children are with their parents,” Parkins said, “and they’ve been pretty much on target developmentally.”
Referrals
Parents are referred to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin Community Services by physicians at area hospitals who recognize a potential need for counseling and support. Referrals are also made by Eau Claire County Department of Human Services and City-County Health Department. Under United Way’s Successful Children’s Network guidelines, these families must have incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level.
The parents in these cases may be facing drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness or abuse, or may simply be unprepared for parenthood and have no support network available to them. In the Building Families program, parents learn their child’s developmental needs and are taught to identify where their child is developmentally, compared to where the child should be.
Parkins identified a growing issue with parenting skills.
“Our whole cell phone society,” she said. “I’ve observed parents that are not receiving services from us that are just on their cell phone all the time and [the child is] … not necessarily being inspired or stimulated or supervised well, or interacted with, to develop the skills the child needs. Parents could use more support to learn about what the needs of their child are.”
The Building Families program also recognizes the importance of helping parents to become wise consumers of services and advocates for their and their children’s health and well-being. Froelich said she often needs to drive parents to the pediatrician for an appointment, and she sits in on the appointment with them. Sometimes, she will ask the doctor to explain what was just said so she can understand it better. This, she said, demonstrates to the parents that it is okay to ask questions, and that it isn’t shameful to not know something.
Knowing and taking advantage of services is critical to struggling families. One success story Parkins and Froelich enjoy talking about is a young father raising an infant on his own. The mother has been struggling with a meth addiction and has been in and out of rehab and therefore home only sporadically.
This father not only welcomes the counsel of Froelich and the Building Families program, but also receives services from his church and from other local organizations. Because of this and his willingness to receive help, he has been very successful and has maintained good employment, is able to provide appropriate child care coverage and, as Froelich noted, the baby is doing “beautifully” and his interactions with others exhibit normal, healthy behavior.
“You go there,” Froelich said, “and there’s always positives going on. The little boy is just the cutest little thing.”
United Way’s Successful Children’s Network
The work done through the Building Families program advances the core vision of United Way’s Successful Children’s Network, according to the organization. That vision recognizes early childhood development as crucial to a person’s overall success in life because children raised in environments that fail to stimulate emotional and cognitive growth or maintain physical health will be at a significant disadvantage by the time they enter school.
This in turn puts them at greater disadvantage for career success and for maintaining health and wellness, and the cycle often continues when they have children of their own, according to United Way
Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin works with United Way and its other partners in the Successful Children’s Network under a comprehensive plan developed by community members with expertise in education and human services. The goal is to unite and work cooperatively in addressing and solving early childhood issues that are likely to prevent children from achieving academic and life success.
Regular program partner meetings in this and the other United Way initiatives provide opportunities for discussions and interactions that can lead to greater awareness of what other agencies are doing, and this in turn helps in such areas as identifying potential new resources.
“We also have developed some relationships, thanks to the United Way [program partner] meetings,” Parkins explained. “It’s been very helpful to be able to be at the table and talk with some of our partners … It’s nice to be able to talk about what’s going on … it’s nice to build those bridges.”
The Child and Family Counseling Program
The CHW Community Services also runs the Child and Family Counseling Program, which is part of United Way’s Community Health Initiative. This program provides both office-based and site-based mental health therapy under the direction of licensed practitioners, and is also able to provide some financial assistance to underinsured individuals.
This program began when the Eau Claire Area School District initiated school-based mental health programs in 2012 and invited Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin to be a partner. It now operates in in four elementary schools for school-based mental health, and six secondary schools providing group therapy, which United Way funds support.
Parkins said these school-based mental health therapy sessions are particularly important because many of the clients they work with would likely not have sought out mental health services on their own.
CHW’s pediatric medical facilities are located in the Milwaukee area and in the Fox Valley. Here, CHW Community Services manages a supervised visitation program and treatment foster care. It also facilitates a Child Advocacy Center, which provides over 300 interviews annually for children and their families where there are either allegations or suspicions of abuse.
“My perception is, Eau Claire is very fortunate to have a program like this in the community,” Parkins said. “Because we have the support and network of Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin and all of its other statewide community services programs, we have a really nice, large footprint and good foundation of knowledge.”
Note: James Peters is marketing director for United Way of the Greater Chippewa Valley and vice-chair of the Chippewa Valley Post board. David Gordon is chair of the CVPost board and is currently acting as CVPost editor. This article is adapted from one in the January, 2016 issue of the United Way Newsletter.