If you read the following seventeen excerpts from the brief they give the impression that child abuse only happens in low income and marginalized communities. I don't think this is helpful. Doesn't unsupportive and harmful parenting happen at all income levels? Consider Dr. Gregory Williams' book, Shattered by the Darkness, and Marilyn Van Derbur's book, Miss America by Day, and Mary Trump's book about the former president.
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talk about preventing an overload of stress on families
Every policy we set – from tax credits to paid leave – should reduce financial pressures on families and increase the time and capacity for supportive family relationships.
Messages expressing the value of human potential boost support for social services and family supports.
Show how certain situations – such as financial stress, isolation, or behavioral health challenges – put pressure on caregivers’ capacity to engage positively with children.
Children need safe, stable environments and relationships to thrive. But decades of housing discrimination – including current unfair lending practices that work against Black families – mean that Black families today are less likely to live in neighborhoods with good jobs. Long commutes and low wages place enormous pressure on parents. Chronic stress can lead to a toxic stress response – flooding the body with dangerous levels of stress hormones – and making anger, hostility, and depression more likely. This set of cascading consequences helps explain the link between race and child abuse or neglect. It’s not race, it’s racism.
Be explicit that the stress of poverty or discrimination can wear down caregivers’ capacity to tune in to children’s needs. Connect the dots between aspects of structural racism that are becoming familiar to the public – such as police violence or lack of access to quality housing – and the ways those experiences can hamper safe, stable, and nurturing relationships.
For example, to position economic supports as a way to prevent childhood adversity, it might work to focus on financial instability as a source of toxic stress. To make the case for paid family leave, it might be better to emphasize that the brain undergoes an intense period of construction during the earliest months of life and parents need the opportunity to interact with babies during this important time.
Consistently advance the idea that social conditions and contexts shape family life and children’s experiences. Emphasize external pressures on families...
To do this, the metaphor of being Overloaded can help. Use this metaphor to describe families experiencing significant stressors such as financial insecurity, housing instability, or hunger. Talk about the solutions you propose as ways to “lessen the load” or “manage the weight.”
. Child neglect is more likely in families that are experiencing an overload of stress. The weight of poverty, especially, can overload parents’ abilities to provide the supportive relationships children need.
Providing stable incomes and stepping up social services can reduce the load that families across the nation are under right now. If we act now, we’ll make sure that children and families can keep moving forward, even during this difficult moment.
The metaphor of an overloaded vehicle helps people understand how things like poverty, social isolation, or behavioral health conditions contribute to neglect.
“Just as a vehicle can only bear so much weight before it stops moving forward, challenging life circumstances can overburden parents, making it hard for them to provide the best kinds of care and support. To prevent a breakdown in care, we can keep the heaviest loads from weighing families down.”
The Overloaded metaphor, in testing, gave people a way to think and talk about the connections between social conditions and child adversity.
Give examples of specific actions that legislative bodies, agencies, or jurisdictions could take to head off sources of serious stress on families or specific things they could do to promote child wellbeing.
Policies that strengthen family financial security can go a long way toward reducing childhood adversity and enhancing the relationships that help children thrive. When families face financial hardship, it sets the stage for more stress and less tuned-in interaction with children. Boosting family incomes through tax credits or paid family leave can relieve the pressure, helping to head off childhood adversity before it happens.
We need ways to center racial and economic justice...
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