Smile At Your Baby! is a licensed non-profit corporation in the State of WA. I am it's founder and executive director. I am also the foster-adoptive mother of a brilliant and beautiful 12-year-old daughter who was severely neglected very early in life, before being placed with me. She was diagnosed at the age of 4 with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). Originally, SAYB! was created to work to prevent other children from getting RAD, but, over time has evolved to be an early childhood trauma/ACEs prevention organization. I am SAYB's only employee and I am a volunteer. This is my passion and is an act of love. I have an exemplary group of well qualified directors on our board, who supervise for accuracy. Two are psychologists, one specializes in foster and adopted children, the other specializes in infant temperament. A third board member has a Master's in early childhood education, and our only male board member is an adult survivor of RAD, author and public speaker. Also, Vivien Sabel who is a member here, and is the author of "The Blossom Method," is on our Advisory Council.
Should you be wondering if BABY BITS are an evidence based practice, I am happy to share that I am working toward making that official. We have not been studied by an objective third party, yet, however, based on research I have done on other text message based educational campaigns I feel confident that we will be. If anyone here would like a copy of the research I have done on text message campaigns, I'd be delighted to share that with you. :D Further, though I do have a couple of lines in the water for getting that objective research done, so far nothing is concrete. If you know of an appropriate party for conducting such research, I'd be delighted to talk with them and provide them with everything they would need.
In the mean time, I would just love to increase our reach. In order to do that, supporters of our BABY BIT program can do any of the following:
1. Download BABY BIT memes from ACEsConnection and share them on Facebook, Pintrest, Instagram or other social networking sites, or even on your own website if appropriate.
2. Tell people you know, perhaps clients, or just friends and family who are young, new or soon-to-be parents about the program and that they need only to text SAYB to 760-670-3130 to subscribe to our free text message version. Or, they can follow us on Twitter or on Facebook. www.facebook.com/Smile.At.Your.Baby
3. Contact me, and I will be happy to send you either an 8.5 x 11 poster, Smile At Your Baby! brochures, and/or BABY BIT promotional fliers that are small and easy to hand out.
If you read the BABY BIT memes posted here almost every weekday, you probably already know that we are very much pro-parent/infant bonding and attachment, that we believe that a healthy, secure bond and attachment in the first three-years of life (and in utero) are crucial and go a very long way towards preventing ACEs, that we also advocate empathy and compassion, and that we embrace diversity. We use plain language so as not to sound overly technical and scare anybody away. What you might not know is that we are neither pro-life, nor pro-choice--we remain neutral on that subject. We don't deal with the issue of circumcision. We do offer alternatives to spanking. We do promote breast-feeding. We do not think that BABY BITS are necessarily the be all, end all to improving parenting skills. We believe that BABY BITs alone are certainly better than nothing, but that ideally, they be used in conjunction with any of the following: visiting home nurse program, parenting classes, doula services, Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, or Child-Parent Psychotherapy.
No one needs permission to use or distribute BABY BITs ever. They are public property and may be freely shared.
Any questions, concerns or comments are most welcome and I promise to respond to all inquiries. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and for your interest in the work that Smile At Your Baby! does to help make our world a better place for us all.
Smiles, Shelley Calissendorff
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