Tag: day care for infants

+MALEVOLENT-TOXIC INFANT-CHILD DAY CARE

alchemynowLeave a comment

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I have too much emotional investment in the subject of this post right now to write about it objectively.  I am presenting an example of a toxic-malevolent in-home private (licensed) day care environment controlled by a woman who has NO knowledge of infant-child stages of development – to put it most mildly.  I am also including some background links about infant-child development.  It is ALWAYS the job of infant caregivers to PROTECT babies and to know how to do this job appropriately.

— Letter (below) written January 17, 2011 by a home-based day care provider as requested by the infant’s mother describing care provided January 12 – 14, 2011 (cost of care:  $135 per week) — Due to changes in his parent’s employment schedule C now requires full time care outside of his home

— Infant being described was born 6 weeks prematurely and turned 10 months old on January 11, 2011

— Other children present in the home were the provider’s 9-month-old and 2 ½ year old and another 11-month-old infant under her care

— C is at his peak critical stage of attachment, had been sick and traveling for two weeks prior to these three days, has been primarily an ‘at-home’ infant with limited ‘social experiences’ and none with his ‘peer group’.

— While C did not hold his own bottle on the first day of care he learned to do so overnight.  When his mother explained to the provider on day two that C has been held, cuddled, loved and nurtured during every bottle feeding and had simply not been encouraged to hold his own bottle, the provider appeared stunned and uncomprehending about infants’ attachment needs

— While C does not crawl using his hands, he creeps like lightening using the propelling power of his entire forearms on the floor with the full intent of exploring EVERYTHING he can get to

— This provider suggested verbally to C’s mother that her infant shows signs of being sociopathic and that he needed ‘behavioral health services’

— C and this letter were immediately taken to a pediatrician who described C as entirely developmentally normal and stated, “This woman should NOT be caring for babies.”

— Copy of this letter and full description of the experience has been reported by C’s mother to the local day care licensing professional

— C is now displaying extreme terror at bath time which he never showed prior to his 3-day experience with this provider which will also be added to this report

— C is my grandson and his mother is my daughter who is starting C in care today at a multiple caregiver preschool (cost of care:  $153 per week)

++

Letter from provider – bold type/underlining is mine

“When playing with the other babies C’s age [see links below, babies do not ‘play with’ babies], he demonstrated unprovoked aggressive behavior. He crawls on top of the other kids, pulls their hair, claws at their face, and bites them. lf he has a toy in his hand he hits them with it. I have removed C from the area [she moved him to the other side of the room and replaced him on the floor], redirected his attention with a new toy, and looked him in the eye while verbally reprimanding his behavior.  But I wasn’t able to get any reaction from him. He doesn’t seem to understand the word no. And even when I used a very assertive tone saying things like, “that’s NAUGHTY!  We don’t hit!” He showed no reaction to me as though I was whispering praise.

[I have to say here this sentence gives me the creepy-goose-bump-chills.  I remember my own severely disturbed, abusive, psychotic Borderline mother had a day care center!  This is something my mother would have said — exactly!]

He wasn’t startled by my tone at all.  Redirection does not work for him. He would just drop whatever toy he had and head straight back to the child I just pulled him off of. This situation repeated itself 5 or 6 times before finally I decided that I needed to put C in an exer-saucer so he couldn’t get at the other children. When he was crying, wanting to be held and I wasn’t able to he would throw a fit and SCREAM at the top of his lungs. When I was finally able to pick him up, he pinched/scratched me and bit my shoulder. He would stop crying instantly when held and would throw an absolute fit the second he was let down.

I am concerned by his inability to self-regulate.  [see links below]  He is unable/un-willing to hold his own bottle while lying on the Boppy pillow. He also couldn’t soothe himself during nap time. He cried for 3 hours. When I went in to check on him he would stop, then when I left, he would start again. Eventually he should be able to cry himself to sleep, but he didn’t. Whenever he did not have one on one adult attention, he would scream and cry. While in my care he was 100% dependant on me for everything. He displays to [no] ability or desire to be independent. (Crawl on his hands and knees, hold his bottle, and open his mouth for a spoon.) He has the social and emotional development of a baby half his age.

It is because of the preceding behavioral issues that I do not feel comfortable/able to care for him any longer. I have a duty to the other parents of children in my care to keep them safe and give them attention as well. I’m sorry that I was unable to provide the kind of care that C needs.  It is my belief that he would do best with a nanny or in a setting where he has one on one care working with a professional that can help him socialize with other children safely.”

++++

— Infant-child development – play

— Cognitive and Emotional Development through Play

— The Importance of Original Play in Human Development

— Social Development (Scroll down and look at TWO)

— Social and Emotional Development in Children

— Infant Aggression – “Most children do not have the cognitive capacity to comprehend aggression fully until their 3rd or 4th year (Maccoby, 1980).”

— Aggression During Early Years — Infancy and Preschool

“Clinicians and researchers agree that problematic expression of aggression is related to disinhibition and poor self-regulation. As capacity for self- regulation and inhibition is being modulated in the first 30 months the frequency of physical aggression increases and then decreases steadily (Tremblay et al., 2004).”

— Physical aggression during early childhood: trajectories and predictors.

“Although it is unusual for young children to harm seriously the targets of their physical aggression, studies of physical aggression during infancy indicate that by 17 months of age, the large majority of children are physically aggressive toward siblings, peers, and adults.”

This study was designed “… to identify which family and child characteristics, before 5 months of age, predict individuals on a high-level physical aggression trajectory from 17 to 42 months after birth.”

CONCLUSIONS:  “Most children have initiated the use of physical aggression during infancy, and most will learn to use alternatives in the following years before they enter primary school. Humans seem to learn to regulate the use of physical aggression during the preschool years. Those who do not, seem to be at highest risk of serious violent behavior during adolescence and adulthood. Results from the present study indicate that children who are at highest risk of not learning to regulate physical aggression in early childhood have mothers with a history of antisocial behavior during their school years, mothers who start childbearing early and who smoke during pregnancy, and parents who have low income and have serious problems living together. All of these variables are relatively easy to measure during pregnancy. Preventive interventions should target families with high-risk profiles on these variables. Experiments with such programs have shown long-term impacts on child abuse and child antisocial behavior. However, these impacts were not observed in families with physical violence. The problem may be that the prevention programs that were provided did not specifically target the parents’ control over their physical aggression and their skills in teaching their infant not to be physically aggressive. Most intervention programs to prevent youth physical aggression have targeted school-age children. If children normally learn not to be physically aggressive during the preschool years, then one would expect that interventions that target infants who are at high risk of chronic physical aggression would have more of an impact than interventions 5 to 10 years later, when physical aggression has become a way of life.”

[Research is showing that smoking is strongly linked to lifelong depression and both are linked to an early history of Adverse Childhood Experiences in early trauma, abuse, neglect and maltreatment adult survivors.]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+INSECURE INFANT ATTACHMENT, DAY CARE AND EMOTIONAL NEGLECT

alchemynow2 Comments

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In a world of perfect strangers a baby’s gotta do what a baby’s gotta do.  There’s a time in an infant’s pattern of physiological development where its attachment patterns appear clearly and unequivocally, and certainly around a year of age is the time nature has intended that this should happen.  That’s why attachment experts can measure infant attachment at this developmental stage.  (Scoring the Mary Ainsworth Strange Situation assessment of infant attachment.)

++

When I read information – or rather MISinformation about infant attachment such as I discovered on the About.com website in its article entitled, Attachment Styles

By Kendra Cherry, About.com Guide I not only cringe, but I want to scream and shake somebody!

The author states (on page 3):

“Before you start blaming relationship problems on your parents, it is important to note that attachment styles formed in infancy are not necessarily identical to those demonstrated in adult romantic-attachment.”

‘Attachment styles formed in infancy’ are directly in response to the quality of early infant-caregiver interactions, and the nature and quality of these attachment interactions DO matter MOST.  These earliest attachment ‘styles’ in infancy BUILD THE BODY an infant will live in/with for the rest of its life.  Never again will those earliest body-brain-nervous system attachment interactions with caregivers have THIS KIND OF IMPACT or THIS KIND OF POWER to change the developmental physiology of a human being exactly in response to the nature of the caregiving environment the body is forming in interaction with.

++

We CANNOT lump together ‘attachment experiences over a lifespan’ as being equal.  They are NOT equal.

Our earliest attachment experiences with our infant-toddler caregivers BUILD us from the ground up.  Sorry folks.  That foundational body-brain building only happens ONCE in a lifetime – for all of us.  There are no exceptions.  Once our earliest developmental Critical Windows of development have closed especially 0-3, whatever nature accomplished for us in response to the quality of our attachment environment is set within us for life.  Nobody can return down the road to a little developing body and get a ‘do over’.

To use computer-related imagery, these attachment-caregiver experiences 0-3 hardwire our body, nervous system, stress-calm response system, vagus nerve system, immune system, and set the combination of our genetic-expression into motion in response to either a benevolent or malevolent environment as our operating system is put into place that will run within us for the rest of our life.

No, dear Kendra Cherry, all lifespan attachment experiences ARE NOT EQUAL!

++

This blog is packed with information about the kinds of physiological alterations that happen as a young infant-child grows a body-brain in response to a malevolent environment of unsafe and insecure attachment relationships.  There is a growing body of thought that these adaptations ALONE do not create the lifetime of suffering a survivor of early severe violent trauma, neglect and abuse will experience.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that it is the CONFLICT or the MISMATCH that happens when a person formed in a malevolent environment later enters a benevolent environment that creates ‘the problems’.  As Dr. Martin Teicher and his research group describe it, those raised from the start of their life form an ‘evolutionarily altered’ body-brain that makes perfect sense in ‘that kind of a world’.  But ‘that kind of body’ cannot LATER adapt to a malevolent world.

++

What does it say about our society that we have evolved an individual segment that aligns itself with ATTACHMENT PARENTING – versus what?  Those that believe there is ANY OTHER SAFE and SANE way to parent infants and children?

Any infant-toddler parenting environment that does NOT put the attachment needs of the little one FIRST and PRIMARY is a malevolent one.

Sure, based on my severe abuse history as an infant-child this blog is devoted to describing the worst of the worst in terms of early caregiver-offspring harm.  But there is a continuum that we need to NEVER lose sight of between a truly optimal and benevolent early caregiving environment and a truly traumatic malevolent one.

My fear is that we are creating a nation of insecurely attached members, most of them who will suffer from an insecure dismissive-avoidant attachment pattern – built DIRECTLY into all levels of their body-brain development – from a lack of optimal early attachment experiences.

I believe it has already happened in America that insecure dismissive-avoidant LACK of optimal early attachment has become the NORM.  TRAGIC!  ANY insecure attachment pattern reflects adaptations to some degree of malevolence and neglect AWAY from optimal.

Once dismissive-avoidant insecurely attached people take over the primary DAY CARE experiences that infants and toddlers experience, the human beings that are being raised ALSO by dismissive-avoidant insecurely attached parents will GUARANTEE that the generations following these patterns on down the line will be SPLIT between so-called ‘logic’ and ‘emotion’ in such a way that emotional intelligence will exit from our culture along with the full optimal development of healthy human beings.  The consequence of the denial of the emotional component of humanity will be a destruction of abilities to experience true empathy, altruism, compassion, whole-human caregiving, increases in diseases of all kinds, and a spiraling destruction of participation in ‘community’.

If we want to raise generations of remote-controllable robots, of zombies who are dead to their own emotions and who are physiologically unable to access them, who are incapable of responding optimally to the emotions of others, who have no clue what true human empathy and the caregiving response it is meant to engender even is, then we are well on our way to accomplishing our mission.

Never mind that we are slipping toward creating a malevolent insecure dismissive-avoidant world.  The citizens we are raising without adequate and optimal safe and secure attachment to their earliest primary caregivers will never even know it.

Those infants being raised within optimal early safe and secure attachment environments are becoming the exception.  As we head toward our own demise it will soon be the fully safe and securely attached individual who has to REVERSE adapt from a benevolent early world to the malevolent world they are going to find outside of their home of origin.

When degrees of malevolence in infant-children’s earliest environment (including emotional neglect that creates a dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment-built body-brain) – become the norm it will be the benevolently, optimally formed safe and securely attached human beings that are going to be the outsiders.

Is this what we want, to create a nation where the healthiest most safely and securely attached individuals don’t fit in because THEY ARE TOO HEALTHY?

Babies have the human right to safely and securely attach to their primary earliest caregiver – their MOTHER.  This is their human right because without this primary safe and secure attachment 0 to primarily age one an infant cannot possibly grow an optimal body-brain.  Day care providers as well as parents need to be educated about how optimal primary safe and secure attachment creates the healthiest human being possible so that these infants who DO attend day care can be given what they need to transition into an environment that cannot possibly put any one single infant’s attachment needs at the top of the priority list.

To deny that an infant has essential attachment needs and to create an environment where these needs are not recognized and met is malevolent emotional neglect whether it happens within the home or within a day care setting.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++