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Champions for Children
SUPPORTING TAMPA BAY PARENTS FOR 40 YEARS
Parenting can be an uphill task on the best of days, so having someone in your corner giving you good information and supporting you while you make tough choices can make all the difference. Tampa Bay parents are luckier than most. For 40 years, they’ve had someone that’s a grandparent, teacher and friend all rolled into one: Champions for Children. Since its creation in 1977 by the Junior League of Tampa as the Community Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, the agency has grown beyond its original scope of dealing with abused and neglected children to being a source of support for ALL children and families, with wellnessbased parent education and the informal mantra: “any baby, any family.” Through programs such as Baby Bungalow, Parents as Teachers and Fathers Resource and Networking Center/ FRANC, families with babies of all ages have found help and resources here. “Every first-time expectant parent is a bundle of nerves and self-doubt,” says Brian McEwen, Ph.D. Executive Director of Champions for Children. “It doesn’t seem to matter what a family’s circumstances are; all new parents are hungry for information and for emotional reassurance. 16 Tampa Bay Parenting JAN 2017
But the sheer mass of information can be overwhelming and sometimes conflicting, leaving an uncertain parent wondering what to believe and who to trust. In our developmental playgroups that occur through many of our programs and in many locations, we’ve learned to balance the amount of information we provide with opportunities for parents to talk to each other and compare experiences.” Educating parents about the month-by-month changes of a young child’s development, for example, can help parents make necessary adjustments to their expectations of their child's abilities, says
McEwen. “Knowledge of changes in all the domains of a child’s development – cognitive, language, sensory, gross and fine motor, and socialemotional – is also the key to nurturing a child’s rapid brain development during these first, formative years,” he says. Helping parents appreciate the reality of so much of the “hard wiring” of a child’s brain in these early years is a powerful motivator. Champions for Children also helps disseminate research that can help parents understand the changes in their world, such as the teaching of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. These points in time represent a collision between a child’s
(and a parent’s) mastery of a developmental task (sleeping through the night), followed almost immediately by an emerging skill (pulling to a standing position, sometimes practiced during bedtime). “The effect on a family is that for these overlapping periods of time, everything seems disorganized and even the most confident parent feels confused and disheartened,” says McEwen. “The Brazelton Touchpoints approach recognizes that it’s often at these vulnerable times in a parent’s waning confidence that s/he reaches out for help. How we respond to parents at such times can either reassure them, with anticipatory guidance, or leave them feeling defeated.” Another important message? It may sound simple, but the importance of closely interacting with babies cannot be overstated. “The ‘serve and volley’ style of parents and children interacting with one another builds attachment, as well as language,” says McEwen. “In fact, we know from our friends in the local school system that frequently children’s early difficulty in settling into the regimen of school is their lack of social or emotional readiness. So talking to a child, reading to a child, singing to a child, all nurture brain development and innate ability along the pathway to kindergarten readiness. CONTINUED ON PAGE 57