T. Berry Brazelton

Now nearly 80 years old, Harvard University pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton stopped seeing private patients some five years ago. But, in many ways, his effect on the physical and emotional health of the nation’s children has never been greater. The author of 26 books on children and child-rearing, Brazelton is perhaps best known for “Touchpoints: Your Child’s Emotional and Behavioral Development,” a best-seller since it was first published in 1992. Since 1996, he has been the director of the Touchpoints Project, which trains health-care providers and those in community service to help families recognize and respond to the developmental needs of their children.

Brazelton’s television series on Lifetime, his regular articles in Family Circle and a syndicated column have made him a household figure among parents of young children. As chairman of the Pampers Parenting Institute, he regularly dispenses on-line advice to parents. Even before the death last month of Dr. Benjamin Spock, Brazelton was frequently called “America’s Pediatrician.” A streetwise young man in dreadlocks, recognizing the doctor on a busy sidewalk recently, sidled up to the mannerly Brazelton and shyly told him, “I love your show on TV, Doc.”

Brazelton has not been shy about dispensing advice to the first family, and not all of it has been so welcome. At a White House summit on early child development last year, Brazelton publicly upbraided President Bill Clinton and other assembled lawmakers for “turning the wrong way” on welfare reform and treating the nation’s poor children as an afterthought.

Brazelton has been married to (the former) Christina Lowell (of the venerable Boston Brahmin family) for 48 years; they have four children. A vigorous grandfather of five--soon to be six--Brazelton retains the genteel Texas drawl of his youth and the gentle manner that comes with 43 years of work with young children and their chronically nervous parents. As he spoke with The Times, he was readying one of his most ambitious projects to date--launching the Brazelton Foundation, which will support both research and programs designed to boost awareness of children’s developmental needs.

His life’s work has made the issue of child care a principal concern. Defying political correctness, he has been blunt in assessing its problems and urgent in calling for better answers. For years, he saw his mission as explaining children’s needs to their parents. In recent months, as Brazelton has become a frequent visitor to lawmakers’ offices, he has defined for himself a new mission: explaining the needs of American parents to the politicians who represent them.

****

Question: Tell me, what was the genesis of the Brazelton Foundation?

Answer: I just think our country is in deep, deep trouble. This [Jonesboro] Arkansas incident was a good example--a tragic example but a good one--of just what our culture is lacking, which is any attention to families early on so they can in turn pay attention to their kids. I think the parents ought to be on trial, not just the children. Because I think these kids were showing signs of being in a vacuum for a long, long time, and their value systems, with guns and all the rest, was perpetrated way back in childhood. I think we can expect this kind of violence, this kind of acting out. These kids were bullies. Other kids didn’t like them. They showed us in all kinds of ways that they really were looking for help.

So I think you then say well, why didn’t the parents help them? They all care now. They’re all upset. I think they needed help themselves, way, way back.

We have a model for preventive health care and also preventive early child care, called the Touchpoints Project, based on my book. We know we need to reach out to parents at stress periods along the way--and they’re predictable stress periods, based on the child’s development. In designing programs, we’ve got to go after parents and child-care and health-care providers, not just children. That’s what we all ought to be after.

*

Q: What is the problem with parents? Is it that they don’t have time? Are they just uneducated to the needs of children?

A: I think, today, it’s mostly stress. Maybe they don’t understand the needs of children, either. This is one thing we’d like to find out about. But it’s not a lack of understanding as much as not having the energy or the motivation or the time to pay attention to what you know about kids. I think parents are more stressed today--logarithmically more stressed--more stressed than they were when I was raising my kids, 20 years ago. It’s time for us to ask, how do we back them up?

We need to get in early and give people the kind of strength they need to understand the child. We need to help them give the child three things that occur in the first three years: a sense of self-esteem, caring about yourself, feeling like you’re valuable; then, if you care enough about yourself, you have altruism, you can care about other people, and then, the third thing is the motivation to learn. This third factor--motivation to learn--draws on all the new brain research--it’s not new but at least it’s now getting to light. And it’s showing that if we start early, these kids are going to be able to learn anything, and learning will be exciting.

*

Q: The president’s $20.7 billion child-care initiative that he announced in January seems to have raised a new debate, or perhaps an old debate depending on how you look at it, on whether child care is the best thing for kids. After all your work with children and families, what’s your answer to that question?

A: I think we aren’t in a position to answer that yet. What we are in a position to ask is: What kind of back-up for families can we give them that will make it work?

The parental-leave bill was based on our research at Harvard, and after 10 years of working, we finally got it. But it didn’t do anywhere near enough. Three months is just a start for being home with a new baby. But even if you’re there for three months, and you know that child and know that that child knows you, then you can back up your relationship every day when you come home, every weekend, and you can do things to make up that time missed.

I would say that, ideally, if you can have the whole first year with a child, that would be the best for the child and you--it’s not just children at risk, it’s adults too. But if you can’t, then I think take off long enough, three-to-four months, and then at least maybe you could go back half-time.

One of the real spinoffs from this parental leave bill was CEOs got really upset about what they were doing to families. So they began to pay attention, and a lot of them now are offering shared-job opportunities and child care on site, are paying attention to what families are going through. Maybe this is how we can turn the country around.

There are four or five big companies--Procter & Gamble is one--that are trying to set up my dream, which would be child care on site, preventive health care right there, after-school care, care for the elderly. All of these all in one place, so that everybody sees this as a community.

*

Q: Do you ever get discouraged looking at the state of day care?

A: I think it’s frightening.

*

Q: What does that mean for parents? Is it so bad that maybe the best course for parents is just to get out of it? Don’t patronize it, if you have any choice at all?

A: If you have the choice, I think that’s absolutely right. I think you’re giving a gift to the child when you stay home with him as long as you can. I think to make people feel guilty who can’t, though, is adding to their hopelessness--and research has found that hopeless mothers make hopeless children. So you have to walk a sort of tightrope.

I find in my own work that most parents go back to work before they’re ready because of their benefits. So if we had universal health care coverage, universal pensions, things like that, I think parents could make a choice. Maybe now they can’t. One of my colleagues, [British child development expert and author] Penelope Leach, has been pushing in this country for kids to just pull out of day care and stay home. And I say to her, “Penny, people are not backed up in this country the way you are in Britain! You can’t really expect parents to make choices that are frightening.”

For mothers especially, these choices are stressful, and I think that’s showing itself in a lot of ways. My own feeling is that we’ve pushed women too far. We’ve split them in two, and we haven’t given them back anything to support themselves on either end. Women at home, I think, are just as split as women in the work force: If they’re at home being “just a mother,” that’s not good enough anymore. So it’s really a psychological crisis that we’re into right now.

As such, I can’t blame the victims. That’s why I can’t go along with saying they ought to stay home or anything like that. I think that each woman should make her own choice. But can’t we back them up on their choice?

*

Q: Do you think there are too many women who financially have the option of staying home when their children are very young, who don’t do it? Should these women be making different decisions?

A: This is one of the things that I’d like for the Brazelton Foundation to do--expose what you’re giving up on in your child’s development if you don’t make a choice that’s really child-oriented. Yeah, I think it’s too high, because people are more me-oriented.

*

Q: Is it the role of government to encourage them to make different decisions or is it something society is going to have to do on its own?

A: Well, I think government ought to have a role in backing them up. For instance, if there’s a subsidy for being at home with your child, that’s a government step to back people up. And if there’s a way to back families up for scaling back to part-time work when their children are young, or to back up businesses that pay attention to family issues, those are government steps that could be taken and would be very powerful in helping with choice. There’s a lot of prejudice against that, so we’ve got to overcome that if we’re going to get there. That’s where I think foundations or the private sector can have an effect.

My own feeling, and this is certainly motivating my work, is that if we inform the public about these issues, they can make their own choice.

It’s going to take backing at four levels to improve child care--at the national level, at a state level, at an institutional level, like business, and at a personal level. And it’s going to be very expensive, there’s no question about that. It should be, because child-care providers have to make it worth their while to have the training they need to take decent care of children.

But that leads me back to your question, is day care good for kids or not? Of course it isn’t, at this point. But could it be? Maybe. We certainly know that ideally kids need their parents, but on the other hand, maybe we could do better with offering supplementary help for both the parents and the child--which is where child care has got to go.

*

Q: At the White House conference last November, you were pretty tough on the welfare reform bill, which President Clinton signed. Now, we’re beginning to see the law in action. What do you see as the effect of welfare reform over time on the physical and emotional health of children?

A: I think it’s a very frightening move if we don’t pay attention to what kids are going to be left with. You tear their mothers away from them and have the mothers go through what we know parents go through--a kind of grieving about leaving their child. And one of the defenses against grief is detachment. We see this in the hospital all the time.

Now, do we want these young women that we’re pushing into the work force to detach from their children? And this is what we’re headed for.

I think we know what it means to children to do this. We’re not working in a vacuum. And the kind of child care that we’re leaving these kids in is frightening. We’ll make a two-class society quicker that way than any other way. There are truly the haves and the have-nots.