A Christmas gift to the next generation

“By then, the damage to the infant’s brain has already occurred and the family situation has escalated into an emergency response.”

Also the problem with removing children is that a mother is likely to simply become pregnant again and have another child. If the core problem isn’t addressed the inter-generational cycle of abuse or neglect will continue.

Dr Perry gave an example of a mother whose 12kg four-year-old was diagnosed as anorexic because she wasn’t putting on weight no matter how many calories she was fed. When a history of the mother’s care-giving was taken, it was discovered that she was fostered in more than a dozen different foster homes from infancy until she was eight, when she was adopted.

But by then, her brain, 96 per cent of which is developed by the age of three, was under-developed in the area of attunement. She was a “good” mother, meeting her daughter’s physical needs, but not her emotional ones.

The little girl, as well as the mother, were sent to a foster mother who taught about how to nurture, cuddle, touch and attune to the needs of infants. Within a month, with emotional nurture through touch, the child put on almost five kilograms without increasing her food intake.

By teaching the mother how to parent and nurture herself, thus activating and growing the under-developed parts of her “emotional” brain, the cycle of neglect was permanently stopped.

During two weeks in Australia, Dr Perry told success story after success story about how traumatised children (and their parents) can be treated, thus stopping the cycle of abuse.

Let’s just hope the power brokers in our government and bureaucrats in our child protection systems can see the economic rationalism of such a preventive approach.

It won’t change family violence statistics for next Christmas or next, but inter-generational problems are never going to be fixed in political time frames.