A Word of Warning and a Word of Advice for the PACES Community

Thank you for the compliment, Maxine.

Thank you, David. This is concise, precise, and dead-on accurate-- i.e. truth and the bottom line, in a nutshell!!

And there you go Mr Dooley....“If we could somehow end child abuse and neglect, the eight hundred pages of the DSM...would be shrunk to a pamphlet in two generations.”

Start today with ending child abuse in your family and neighborhood and city.

Use all the info that has been gathered and garnered in the past 100 years to heal that one person or group or neighborhood and we will be well on our way to 100 percent success in modeling healthy families and generations from this day forward.

MM

@Vincent J. Felitti, MD posted:

I certainly agree that figuring out how to improve parenting skills across the nation would be a huge public health advance, perhaps the most important of the century.  This might best be done by depiction rather than conventional didactic approaches like books, pamphlets, and lectures.  What if someone were to develop a serial TV program starting with pregnancy, then moving forward over time to illustrate what supportive parenting looks like and how it plays out decades later.  This would be contrasted with depicting a destructive household and how that plays out decades later.  Perhaps some PACEs members might be in a position to start thinking how to move this to reality.  

I love this idea @Vincent J. Felitti, MD! I was lucky to have a mom mentor, 12 years older than me and with kids much older than mine. She did not experience a lot of trauma and I had experienced a ton. It was AMAZING to be able to talk to her, confide in her, WATCH how she parented her own children and be able to contrast and compare what maybe was and wasn't a trauma-related issue of mine vs. a typical parenting thing. I didn't have any way of doing that and for me that was so stressful. I knew what I didn't want to do, but not how to achieve that OR what to do instead and so my parenting journey, though with only one child, while attachment focused was really a steep learning curve.

I had the benefit of being an adoptive parent, and therefore required to have a bunch of training, and training on how to support kids who have experienced trauma, poverty, war, loss, and disruption to birth family and culture. This, for me, was for more healing (of my own trauma wounds) than the 12 years of trauma therapy I'd had near Boston, at world-renowned places, that constantly focused on how bad my childhood was and not how I could do/be/feel better. It helped to have context, for sure, and that's important but more important would have been for me to see what is considered normal and healthy by someone who also hadn't known, had to learn, and who is a peer - rather than the typical edupuking and shaming of survivors and parents who haven't had advantages many have and are then blamed for what we don't know, didn't get, and are trying to learn with very little societal understanding or support and often while dealing with current stressors as well as past trauma.

That's part of why we started Parenting with ACEs, to let parents share about what the challenges and opportunities are, what is hard and what we need because it's SO OFTEN NOT what is currently available, insurance covered, etc. It requires safety, relationships, community, and a safe place to share new learning, skills, and tools and to define, for and with other survivor parents, what we most need for ourselves and our families and to benefit our children. 

For me, materials that didn't first affirm and honor the pain and confusion, and jumped to resilience and how-to, often didn't get my attention or ring as true as credible to me and often felt like they were based on faulty, racist, and classist in nature. Too often the soundbites just sounded like jargon rather than what is actionable, effective, and useful for parents without the traditional family and community support, and with more than the average amount of complex trauma, pain, and economic and other struggles.

Therapy and feel-good slogans can be a form of support for some. But what our lives are like in a clinical hour is very different than the day in and day out 24/7 challenges of ALL ASPECTS of parenting with ACEs. Seeing, not just the ideal, but how others from a similar space, place, background, found a way and what did or didn't help - that - I can assure you is something A LOT of us would be quite interested in watching and it would not only help parents but generations, and grandparents.

So, all to say - I LOVE THAT IDEA and always have and hope it finds a way into happening! Programming that happens where we are (at home), and is frequent, and that would continue to keep us inspired and motivated and on a daily basis - that would be amazing!!!!

Cissy

Parenting with ACEs / Community Manager

@David Dooley posted:

How are you going to get people to watch it, Dr. Felitti?  It must compete with everything on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Youtube, etc, etc, etc.

We will have to believe in "the butterfly effect" and keep doing what we are doing...one person at a time. That is what you did with your bumper sticker project. It's what I've been doing (and I still cannot even believe how many people have not heard about the ACEs Study) but now I get to tell them about PACEs...how including the positive with the negative gives this mission a new energy. Just keep going...and going...and going...because...I appreciate you!

@Vincent J. Felitti, MD posted:

I certainly agree that figuring out how to improve parenting skills across the nation would be a huge public health advance, perhaps the most important of the century.  This might best be done by depiction rather than conventional didactic approaches like books, pamphlets, and lectures.  What if someone were to develop a serial TV program starting with pregnancy, then moving forward over time to illustrate what supportive parenting looks like and how it plays out decades later.  This would be contrasted with depicting a destructive household and how that plays out decades later.  Perhaps some PACEs members might be in a position to start thinking how to move this to reality.  

How are you going to get people to watch it, Dr. Felitti?  It must compete with everything on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Youtube, etc, etc, etc.

I certainly agree that figuring out how to improve parenting skills across the nation would be a huge public health advance, perhaps the most important of the century.  This might best be done by depiction rather than conventional didactic approaches like books, pamphlets, and lectures.  What if someone were to develop a serial TV program starting with pregnancy, then moving forward over time to illustrate what supportive parenting looks like and how it plays out decades later.  This would be contrasted with depicting a destructive household and how that plays out decades later.  Perhaps some PACEs members might be in a position to start thinking how to move this to reality.  

You've summarized a paradigm shift, Mr. Dooley. Thank you. (I have so much more to write about this, but no time right now. Please keep writing about this!)

Hear, here! Thank you for sharing this reality within our field!

As someone who has worked in prevention education for the past decade, I can attest to this 100%! Sadly the majority of funds awarded to non-profits are for intervention services.

Prevention education is often looked at as the “playtime practices” and “outreach events”, not understanding the investment, skills, and strategies needed to do the job effectively. Unlike intervention services, prevention methods are often not seen and cannot be measured. Most grants only allow Preventionists the opportunity to meet with youth and parents about healthy relationship conversations a handful of times. Nothing is mandatory, parents can opt out their child, and refuse to show up for the lessons themselves.

It reminds me of the li(n)e I’ve often heard from folx within the field, at the executive level: “We want to put ourselves out of business.”

When? Because without mandated, trauma-informed, healing-centered Trusted Adults supervising and supporting youth in all spaces (schools, community centers, sports teams, etc), we don’t want to end violence, we want to silence it.

Let’s stop saying “sorry” and be better!