Dr. T. Berry Brazelton never figured himself to be an activist.
Even as his reputation grew-he is now considered the foremost authority on children in the nation-he stayed away from politics. He had his hands full practicing pediatrics in Cambridge, Mass., teaching at Harvard Medical School, writing books and a magazine column and doing research on child development.
In fact, When Dr. Benjamin Spock began to march for peace and speak out against the Vietnam War, Brazelton questioned whether Spock was doing the right thing.
”I thought he got himself too involved,” Brazelton acknowledged in a recent interview. ”But I admire the hell out of him for doing it.”
Now the affable 69-year-old Brazelton, who is often compared to Spock and called his ”heir apparent,” finds himself in the same kind of spot. He is speaking out all over the country on a major political issue, taking his concerns to the presidential candidates as well as to the public. Recently he even agreed to cochair a new national lobby and is urging others to get involved.
But the issue isn`t peace: It`s children and families.
Brazelton is very worried about the American family-the stresses of trying to juggle jobs and child-rearing, of being a single parent, of insufficient quality day care, of too little time. He fears for those children who are being raised in poverty: one in five youngsters in the nation. And he thinks it`s time for the government to step in and help, time for parents to demand that help.
Brazelton was in Chicago recently to help launch Parent Action, a first-of-its-kind national parents` lobby. A division of the Chicago-based Family Resource Coalition, Parent Action`s members and staff will work in Washington and around the country to get and keep family issues such as day care, health insurance and education on the political front burner. Dues will be just $5 yearly.
The group is being modeled after the enormously successful American Association of Retired Persons. ”This is for all parents,” said Mary Conklin, a Senate aide who is leaving her job to head Parent Action`s Washington office.
She stressed that this will be a bipartisan effort, that it will not advocate one political approach or solution to a problem, such as the need for more day care. ”If we take a position on legislation, it will be the decision of a legislative policy commission,” Conklin explained.
She and the group`s other organizers say the purpose is to get parents to speak out as a solid voice, to make their needs and concerns known to those who are writing legislation and making policy.
”I want to empower young parents to get in there and to get what they need,” Brazelton said at the press conference called to announce the formation of Parent Action recently. I want to fight for Parent Power.”
”We have every sign we need that our culture is in grave danger,”
Brazelton warned, ”and it`s because we`re not paying enough attention to strengthening our families.”
Despite his strong words, Brazelton is feeling his political way. After the press conference he worried out loud whether he had come on ”too strong.”
At the same time, while many people share Brazelton`s concerns about the problems facing the American family, they don`t all agree that more government programs would be the solution.
”I`m afraid of subsidizing the lifestyle choice of the two-career family with their child in day care while the rest of us have to pay for that choice,” said Dr. Allan Carlson who heads the conservative Rockford Institute and has written extensively on family issues.
”It`s unfair and unwise.” Instead, Carlson would like to see more tax credits offered to families with children ”to leave more money in their pockets and let them make their own choices about the way they live.”
Brazelton, in turn, firmly believes families need more help today, and that conviction ultimately sparked his political involvement. Over the last few years, he explained, he watched the parents of his young patients grow increasingly stressed.
One expectant mother began to cry, he recalled, when he raised the subject of breast-feeding. She explained she wouldn`t breast-feed her infant because she would be returning to work shortly after the birth.
Other parents confessed that they didn`t get down on the floor to play with their infants.
”These parents won`t let themselves get attached,” Brazelton said, because they fear increased pain when the separation does occur. ”It`s as if they were making excuses for not getting too close to the baby. That`s scary as hell.”
It`s cheating the babies as well as damaging the adults` development as persons, Brazelton believes.
He noted that children who don`t make close attachments will have trouble with attachments throughout their lives.
Brazelton goes a step further. He is convinced that so many problems adolescents face today-depression, suicide and drug abuse among them-are
”obvious symptoms of a lack of passionate families, of attached families.”
Yet he sees improvement if parents were better able to navigate between the demands of the work force and home. For example, he supports parental job leave, in which parents could remain at home for a certain period with a newborn, adopted or ill child. He also favors flextime arrangements, in which parents could tailor their working schedules to the demands of their families. Yet while he says it`s tougher to be a parent now, he also thinks it`s more exciting. People today, he observes, are much more committed to parenting than Brazelton`s contemporaries were a generation ago.
After he gives a speech, Brazelton notes, these parents are so anxious to get their questions answered about their own children that they won`t let him leave. ”They grab my tie, or my trousers,” he said. ”It`s fantastic that people feel so much.”
He stresses that he`s not suggesting that mothers retire from the work force, or that being placed in day care is inherently bad for children. ”If it`s good quality care, all the evidence I see is that children do perfectly well,” Brazelton said. Among other things, he said they learn to socialize and take direction from teachers.
In addition, their working moms bring home a tremendous sense of confidence from being successful at work. ”They can hand it down to the children,” Brazelton said. ”If they do it right, they can do very well by the children (giving them) the same sense of immportance and competence.”
Brazelton has some advice for working parents to make their lives a little easier: ”Cheat on the work force. Save some energy during the day (for your children).”
As soon as you get home at night, he says: ”Get your children in your lap and rock. Be back together as a family.”
Take the kids with you in the kitchen while you prepare dinner, he says. Let them help. ”If you spend time and cement the family, then the kids will feel part of it,” he says.
He urges parents not to despair. He is convinced that just as a child passes certain developmental milestones, so too will the nation develop more programs and focus more on the needs of the American family. ”We`re going to take a spurt in our national family development that will be positive,”
Brazelton says.
That will be helped tremendously, he believes, by harnessing for political battles the energy people put into parenting. ”Families have to realize they can pitch in together and get something done,” he said.
Parent Action`s organizers point to the recent defeat in the U.S. Senate of a package of family bills offering child-care assistance and parental job leaves as an example of why parents must get out and push their own agenda.
U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D., Colo.), who based her short-lived presidential campaign on drawing attention to family issues, notes that these issues receive overwhelming support in the polls but that the support doesn`t translate into a strong political voice.
But changing that will take work and the cooperation of business and government. Schroeder, whom Brazelton credits for spurring his political action, thinks he may be just the person to get the message across. ”He`s very credible,” she said. ”A very powerful spokesman.”
Brazelton, a grandfather with four grown children, has published more than 150 articles and 15 books on child development, some of which have been translated into several languages.
The latest book, ”What Every Baby Knows” (Ballantine, $8.95) is based on his Lifetime cable television series by the same name. Brazelton already is working on a second volume of the book.
He is clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and founder and chief of the chilcant achievements in pediatrics was the creation of the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale which is used around the world to test not only the physical and neurological responses of newborns but also their psychological well-being and the individual differences between babies at birth.
Brazelton also has become a familiar figure on Capitol Hill, testifying on behalf of bills for parental job leaves. Earlier this year, he and Schroeder traveled the country together on the Great American Family Tour to draw attention to family issues.
”We`d always get at least 1,000 parents,” Brazelton recalled. ”They would talk about political issues (for a few minutes) and then they`d get into toilet training or thumb sucking or sibling rivalry. But it represented the energy that is out there, waiting for someone to pick up on.”
He hopes he can help to do just that as other political observers suggest the timing may be right to draw parents into the political process-coalescing around issues that affect them as parents.
Family issues have been discussed more than ever before during this presidential campaign, political observers note. Both Michael Dukakis and George Bush, for example, have offered specific day-care programs: Some political pundits have suggested that in this campaign, day-care centers have replaced factories as a familiar backdrop.
”Both campaigns have recognized there is a battle over kids to be fought in this election,” said Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who was among the first last year to note the increasing importance of family issues to voters. ”People are very anxious about their families,” he said.
But Brazelton is convinced there is a long road ahead. For one thing, he said he was dismayed that neither Bush nor Dukakis has addressed the problems of the American family ”with any deep understanding of what`s happening to people.”
”It`s not even good rhetoric,” he said.
Brazelton acknowledged that legislation to help families would be costly. One child-care proposal in Congress, for example, would have required a $2.5 billion appropriation.
That`s what critics like the Rockford Institute`s Allan Carlson would like to avoid. He is against a government-mandated, parental, job-leave law for the same reason. ”Once the government is pushing it, it becomes social engineering,” he said. Plus, he adds, ”One way or another, we would all be paying for it,” whether we need it or not.
Says Brazelton: ”Compared to a missile or a space shot, which is more important? Why doesn`t somebody say so?”
