Miami Judge Teaches Troubled Parents How to Interact With Tots
A Miami judge has developed a program to help neglected kids learn to trust.
May 30, 2007 — -- In the time it takes you to watch "Good Morning America" -- just two hours -- 10 children will have been removed from their homes because their parents cannot care for them properly. And every day in the United States, 129 children are removed from their homes and placed in foster care.
It is shocking statistics like these that made Cindy Lederman, a family court judge in Miami, determined to do something. Lederman came up with a program that, she says, makes for better parents, safer children and stronger families.
"I see children come in because they've been abused by their parents," Lederman said. "I watch the children grow up. The children have their own babies, and they do to their babies just what their parents did to them, and the cycle never ends."
After decades of witnessing this vicious cycle, Lederman decided to put her law books aside and instead turn to the science of early brain development. In doing this, she learned that babies and young children who are raised by abusive or negligent parents experience extreme stress and even acute depression.
One experiment, the still-face experiment, illustrates the effect neglect can have on a baby. In the experiment, a mother interacts normally with her baby, who smiles, gestures and babbles in response. Then the mother turns away. When she turns back to face the child, she presents a totally still face, showing no emotion and refusing to interact.
The baby senses very quickly that something's not right. To get her mother to respond, the baby will smile, gesture, even screech. In just two minutes, the baby is in total distress, writhing, crying and turning away in anguish.
"One of the things children learn in the first year of life, particularly the second half of the first year of life, is to form an important relationship with at least one person, maybe more than one person," said Joy Osofsky, a professor and psychiatrist who worked side by side with Lederman in designing an intervention program to help families in distress. "For children who have been taken out of their homes because they have been abused or neglected and put in one or more placements, they don't learn that, and so what you see is a growing inability to trust people."
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