Some who read this may find it a strange title but others of you who have worked with children from challenged environments like orphanages, or seen children abused in many of its forms in different environments, will understand what I am writing about. When I say ‘broken’ I mean babies who are emotionally and psychologically scarred — more often than not you will see no physical marks on their bodies. It is their behaviours that tell you their developmental history.
Broken babies are mostly those babies who are in the care of uncaring individuals. The worst part of this syndrome is that the person breaking the baby could even be a family member. In a few cases those family members do not understand that how they treat their child borders on neglect. In other cases the caregivers have no training or when they claim to be trained their training is at a very poor level, either due to their own inability to learn or the inability of the institution granting the certification to know what they should really be teaching or the type of person they are sending out into the world of early care.
We all know about impoverished families and the low socio-economic groups that are frequently the individuals and situations world wide which are funded and studied by researchers at many of the world’s most prestigious universities. However, the biggest group of broken babies, largely hidden from view, now contains the children of the affluent.
How many children do you know where both parents are considered very successful? My ex-dentist was a wonderful person (her husband is a dentist with his own practice too). I really trusted her to care for my teeth and my sons’ teeth, but she has three children with developmental delays. THREE! Who was caring for her babies while she was working?
Another couple I know has two children. The mother is a lawyer and the father works long hours in a travel-related business. Their oldest child was diagnosed with flat head syndrome and had to wear a helmet to compensate for the condition, and when I saw their son at about age two his pallor was positively grey. I was worried about how he was developing too. I recalled that even as a baby when he was with his mother he was bottle-fed on breast milk but in quite a detached manner. Both children were in the care of the same mother-and-daughter run family day care. If that were me I would have been worried about the caregiving for the first child and made changes for the second! (I suspect it was ‘too late’ by the time they discovered the flat head syndrome in the first — but why did it not occur to them that the caregivers might be at fault?) I don’t believe there was any reference by a physician to the possible cause of the flat head syndrome. Most experienced caregivers would know the cause, even some therapy websites are suggesting that spending too many hours in a container could be contributing to the problem!
There is hardly a family I know, mostly with two working parents, where one or more of their children isn’t suffering from a developmental delay. Sadly most of the delays haven’t been recognised by either the parents or their pediatrician so no testing has been done. When testing is done there doesn’t seem to have been a comprehensive battery of tests to assess true intelligence versus behaviour problems, including a full developmental, family and day care history (For me the ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of early care are frequently critical missing details in a full developmental test).
In several families I know I have observed distinctly quirky behaviours, developmental or emotional issues from as early as four months! Neither parents nor caregivers seem to see the issues I’ve observed. Is that because I know what can be done to correct those developmental anomalies? I’ve done that on several occasions and know that the longer we wait to correct even a small challenging issue the worse it becomes and the more complex it becomes to treat. Or is it that such anomalies have become ‘the norm’?
For me, all the children I’ve mentioned are broken babies in some form.
Unless you have been around the lively and cheerful families whose children aren’t broken you can have no idea how big the difference is! Sad to say I only know a few families with children like that — the pleasure I get, anyone gets, from being around them is immeasurable!
It takes more conscious effort to care for babies and young children today. So many parents want to maintain their pre-baby social life plus their careers — when is there actually time to be with their baby? How can they get to know this little person, to understand their true needs?
Couple the parents’ needs and work obligations with a caregiver who hasn’t a clue as to what babies need and…another broken baby!
There was a broken baby on television some weeks ago. Well-meaning parents had installed a webcam for a caregiver they had employed for a year. The caregiver was actually smacking a seven-month-old! A seven-month-old! Will that baby ever be repaired? Will he always suffer from a fear of new caregivers, especially ones who don’t look like his parents — the parents looked southeast Asian, the caregiver was black.
That child will suffer from broken baby syndrome for a long time and I’m not sure that the parents are really aware of how serious a developmental issue it is.
Check out a few quirky adults you know and try and build some sense of their early years and then you’ll start to understand what I mean. Better yet, meet their parents and then it will all become clear to you!