There is a
Growing Appreciation ...
David Chamberlain
...There is a growing appreciation in our capitol city and throughout the United States, expressed in public polls, that help for troubled children and adults must come earlier and earlier in time if we are to avoid the catastrophic cost of illness, disorder, and violence in society. In our view, "early" means early-early, really early, like at the beginning when the foundations of health, love and relationships are constructed. I repeat, if parenthood, birth, and our view of ourselves (psychology) were transformed, society would also be transformed, and the planet itself -- Mother Earth -- would be safe and secure.
The transformation we seek is not from the top down but from the bottom up: primal change, changed foundations. We are discovering in modern times how difficult it is to change after the fact: change through government intervention, military intervention, police intervention, medical intervention, educational remediation, social rehabilitation, and psychotherapy for primal trauma -- all are enormously expensive. A microgram of prevention could be worth a ton of cure.
To get it right from the beginning means working to transform parents. How far can civilization progress with missing fathers, no-care mothers, and throw-away babies? Children cannot be transformed without first transforming parents into aware, sensitive, loving persons. And probably parents cannot be transformed without education about prenatal life and without support and love for them. This represents a new realism that society has its origins in parents and babies, and a new realism that nurturance is the core of parenting -- the fuel of love that makes things work. Look at the world around you. Can human development go forward without nurturance to mind and spirit?
Let me close with the sentiments expressed in a personal letter I received from a colleague who had just read my paper, "Intelligence of Babies Before Birth" (1993) which I presented to the First World Congress on Prenatal Education, in Granada, Spain. Scott Walker wrote:
"How do you restrain yourself from running wildly in the streets and hospital corridors yelling for the abuse to stop? It drives me nuts to know that the acceptance by humanity at large of what I feel we all intuitively know -- babies are people and are aware -- could within a generation or so completely change the human condition."
This excerpt is the concluding section of the Presidential Address given in July 1993 at the Sixth Biennial International Congress of the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Association of North America by David B. Chamberlain PhD.