"If you do that one more time, I'm going to pop you, and you know I will!"
The mother's words stopped Marcy Witherspoon in her tracks. She turned to glance at the pair: a mother waiting impatiently for her son's appointment at St. Christopher's Hospital, and a toddler who was bouncing around the room, checking out the walls, the floor and the other patients.
Witherspoon was in a hurry herself. But as the parenting counselor in ISF's Family Safe Zone project, this is her job: to spot and help defuse stressful moments between parents and their children.
"I went over to them and said to the mom, 'Can I get him a toy, because he looks like he has so much energy?' She just melted. She said, 'Oh, would you?'"
Witherspoon ducked into a room and returned with a small plastic piano, which she handed to the mother. "I didn't tell her how inappropriate her words were. I just offered her some kindness."
The Family Safe Zone, a one-year pilot project at St. Christopher's, is designed to provide tools-to residents and attending physicians, social workers and security guards-to do what Witherspoon does dozens of times each week: interrupt a potentially toxic situation between parent and child with a few kind words.
Sometimes the conversation goes further, and Witherspoon talks with the parent about brain growth and how stress can hurt a child's ability to learn, play and thrive. She might give them a booklet: "The Amazing Brain and Discipline." She might offer her card and invite the parent to call or text anytime.
There is a research component to the Family Safe Zone project, too, including clinic observations and a quantitative study: 100 parents and hospital staff have completed surveys including questions such as, "Do you agree that children should be seen and not heard? Do you think two-year-olds should always listen to their parents?"
Some respondents returned to fill out a second survey, following an intervention by Witherspoon; evaluation of the pre- and post- surveys will determine whether parents' attitudes changed as a result.
On good days, Witherspoon said, she witnesses those moments of change. There was the time she entered an exam room where a 17-year-old was sprawled across the table, as if taking a nap, while his mother waited in a chair. When Witherspoon offered her usual introduction-"I just come to talk to parents about their children"-the mother dismissed her: "Oh, he's already grown!"
"I said, 'We've found out that the brains of our teenagers are not finished growing until they're 24 or 25.' She said, 'No kidding!' It got her attention."
Another man, a divorced father who had injured his son with the heel of a shoe, met five times with Witherspoon for parenting counseling in the hope of regaining his visitation rights. They talked about anger and stress. He told Witherspoon that he used to be a boxer.
"He was a really smart guy. I helped him develop his own plan of what things he could do when he got angry. He said, 'I could hit the punching bag.'"
Another man, in the clinic with his girlfriend and their infant, peppered Witherspoon with questions about brain development, about DNA, about how certain behaviors could become part of our genetic make-up. "He was fascinated by the information."
Others have been more resistant. Witherspoon recalls a mother who declared, "The problem with children today is they don't get enough lashings!" and proudly reported that she had used lashings to discipline her four older children. Since developing high blood pressure, the woman explained, she no longer lashed her six-year-old.
"I said, 'I'm sorry to hear you have high blood pressure, but I'm glad that you don't lash your child." When Witherspoon offered the woman a booklet on "The Amazing Brain and Discipline," she scoffed, "You don't raise children from a book." Later, though, the woman told an attending physician that Witherspoon had listened to her and been kind.
"You just never know how you'll touch somebody."
That's the message Witherspoon tries to convey in her trainings to hospital and clinic staff-both at St. Christopher's and around the city-using the Partnering with Parents and One Kind Word curricula.
Partnering with Parents teaches providers how toxic stress affects brain development and children's health, and how domestic violence and corporal punishment are among those toxic stressors. One Kind Word uses examples and role-plays to help providers interrupt a potentially explosive moment between parent and child without making the situation worse.
In that training, Witherspoon describes a typical hospital moment: a crowded waiting room, an exasperated mother, a toddler who can't stop babbling. The mother finally explodes: "Shut your f**in' mouth!" and a staff person approaches her to chide, "We don't use that kind of language in here."
"The woman feels judged, patronized, talked down to like she's the child," Witherspoon said. "Instead, you could say, 'Yeah, we wait so long for kids to start talking, and once they start, they do not stop!' And the parent might say, 'Oh, I know!' And that may be it. You've stopped that situation from happening right then."
Witherspoon invites her listeners to put themselves in the mother's place: perhaps she's caring for a dying parent; maybe her partner slapped her that morning. Maybe she took three buses to get to the hospital or is worried that she'll lose her job if she takes another day off to care for a sick child. She reminds them of these words, written in longhand on a piece of paper she keeps pinned to her office bulletin board: "Be kinder than necessary, because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle."
The trainings have had an impact: one physician, in practice for 25 years, told Witherspoon that she would change her tone when talking to parents, to be less judgmental and more compassionate. A security guard told her, "That One Kind Word thing really works -- well, about 90% of the time."
When Witherspoon talks about toxic stress -- whether to an exhausted resident or a beleaguered parent-she is also talking about hope.
She recalls a young woman, not yet 30, who was the mother of nine children. The oldest was born when the girl was just twelve. Both her parents had died of drug overdoses. Three of the nine children lived with her.
"When I said, 'Tell me about yourself as a parent,' she told me she was loving and fun. I asked her what helped her to be a loving parent. She said it was her grandmother, who'd raised her. And then she told me that her oldest daughter was 17, that she was not pregnant, and that she was applying for college.
"One of the things that I picked up on, early on, was that people didn't want to hit their children. People wanted to be the best parents they could be. They wanted things to be better for the next generation. I give them information about the brain and say, 'You can always change. You can always do better.'"
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