New "Closing the Gap" Initiative : Baby Talk

In February 2012, the Family Study Center, in collaboration with the Concerned Organization for the Quality of Education for Black Students (COQEBS) and other community partners launched a major new community initiative. The initiative will help augment ongoing COQEBS efforts to address the achievement gap between African American students and their school-aged peers. The innovative focus of the new initiative is on front-end supports for our youngest citizens and their parents and caregivers: enhancing early learning environments to better prepare of infants and toddlers for the eventual transition to preschool.  At a community event that came to be known as “Baby Talk”, over 100 African American parents, infant care providers, and others concerned about the well-being of south county children gathered at St. Petersburg College Allstate.

Among the invited panelists who addressed parents at the event were Congresswoman Kathy Castor, school superintendent Julie Janssen, and JWB head Gaye Lancaster. Family Study Center Director James McHale spoke to parents and caregivers about African American children’s preschool readiness, and demonstrated routine everyday strategies appropriate for promoting the brain development of babies and toddlers, including daily floor time and reading of books. Dr. McHale's Infant Family Mental Health class at USFSP worked with parents and caregivers on additional enrichment exercises for infants and toddlers and to introduce them to and help them navigate the Zero To Three (ZTT) website containing a variety of short video clips of interactions with babies and toddlers of all ages.

Baby Talk will now be an annual south county community event each February, and a north county event is planned in Tarpon Springs on October 22, 2011. Other events in the new initiative include smaller get-togethers to be held every 2-3 months at local community centers, churches and other venues called "Baby Steps to Baby Talk". The first of these was a gathering held on Saturday, July 9 at the Enoch Davis Center that provided intensive "hands-on" opportunities for parents and babies to engage in coached floor time activities. Dr. McHale again gave demonstrations, coached and commented on the interactions of a volunteer parent. Together with several volunteers from HIPPY, he also provided coaching and encouragement for 8 families with babies from 6-30 months during 20-minute face-to-face interactions between the caregiving adults and the babies. The aim of this new series of "Baby Socials" is to help increase the capacity of community partners to regularly carry these Socials out themselves for area families.

Stay tuned for more updates on the October north county event and other upcoming Baby Steps gatherings!

Watch a Video on the Workshop Here!

Children's Movement of Florida

It seems like a lifetime ago that 1,300 children, parents,
grandparents and other interested and concerned citizens attended a rally at Calvary Chapel of St. Petersburg to insist that our legislative representatives make the well-being and education of our children the state's highest priority in their 2011 budgetary
deliberations. That rally last September 20th was not just one of many "milk and cookies" parties supported last fall by the Children's Movement of Florida as part of a coordinated statewide campaign spearheaded by a large, influential and non-partisan group of state leaders -- it was the state's largest. Coverage of the event can be found here.

Several post-rally editorials on the current state of Florida's
Children and the urgent need for action were written by many stateleaders; one of those editorials, by Family Study Center Director James McHale, can be found here.

While experts are still assessing the final impact of the decisions
made about programming and supports for children in our state, a
preliminary assessment has been provided by the Children's Movement. It can be accessed here.

On Friday, July 2, 2010, Center Director James McHale delivered a plenary session on coparenting in multi-generational family systems to the World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) in Leipzig, Germany.

The plenary focused on the Center's recently-completed work on the extended family relationships of incarcerated mothers with preschool-aged children cared for by relatives in the mother's absence. The unique session brought together leading family researchers Susan Dickstein (Brown University) and Kristin Lindahl (University of Miami) to work together with McHale in a clinical "interface". Each outlined their perspective on a family's strengths and struggles through different windows provided by a mother-grandmother discussion about the child completed while mother was in jail (Dickstein's analysis) and a mother-grandmother-child triadic play interaction completed shortly after the mother's release and return to the family (Lindahl's analysis). McHale provided guidelines for effectively assessing and understanding coparenting alliances in families with young children. The thrust of the presentation was to illustrate for practitioners worldwide the importance of thoughtfully assessing and understanding how effectively the adults principally responsible for guiding young children's development and well-being -- whomever those individuals happen to be -- work together in the child's best interests.

The World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) is a non-profit organization for scientific and educational professionals. WAIMH‘s central aim is to promote the mental well-being and healthy development of infants throughout the world, taking into account cultural, regional, and environmental variations, and to generate and to disseminate scientific knowledge. For more information, visit: www.waimh.org

Read about infant mental health in Pinellas County in an article in USF magazine. Click here.

Coordination and communication between the adults who care for infants and young children is every bit as critical when those adults are the baby's parents and the child care providers who spend many hours each week socializing and caring for the child. Dr. McHale discussed the vital importance of family-care provider coordination with nearly 300 Pinellas County care providers at the 2008 Infant Toddler Conference for the Early Learning Coalition of Pinellas County.

Click here for more information.

In September 2008, Dr. McHale presented a keynote address and clinical workshop for the state of Illinois’ Infant Mental Health Association outlining the significance of coparenting dynamics in nuclear family systems headed by heterosexual and gay parents, fragile family systems headed by unmarried parents, extended kinship systems, and biological-foster family systems. Click the link below to read more...

2008-09-29 Dr. McHale Leads Illinois Conference

Expecting a new baby? Coping with the new challenges that face all parents during the early months and years of new parenthood? Dr. McHale's book on coparenting, available through Zero to Three Press, deals with these universal issues and provides comprehensive coverage for both families and professionals.

Purchase from Zero To Three Press here.

In celebration of Valentine's Day, 2008, the Family Study Center co-sponsored an on-campus world premier at USF St. Petersburg of an Emmy-nominated documentary concerned with the challenges to and rewards of relationship longevity. Partnering with the Family Study Center on this event was Family Resources of Pinellas County.

Listen to Dr. McHale's interview with WUSF's The University Beat as he discusses some of the major findings from his book on coparenting: Charting the Bumpy Road of Coparenthood.

Click here to listen.