Child in Mind

Resilience Embodied: Dance in the Time of COVID-19

August 14, 2020

Dance offers a kind of parallel process to infant-parent interaction. As teachers and students together choreograph new dances, missteps inevitably occur on the journey to a coherent graceful performance. Each class offers participants the opportunity to build that hope and agency anew.
Over ten years ago my own daughter’s countless hours of classes, rehearsal, and performance with the dance program played a central role in her development as she navigated the tumultuous middle school years. The experience became part of her core resilience now revealed in fortitude and flexibility as a doctor-in-training on the front lines of the pandemic.

Autism and the Search for Certainty

August 1, 2020

The truth lies in our humanity, in the complex interplay between biology and environment. It lies in the stories we tell and the meaning we make of our experience. The search for the truth lies in protecting space and time to listen to those stories, in all their richness and complexity.

COVID-19 and Separation of Immigrant Families

July 18, 2020

Immigrant families currently face a disturbing variation of the horrific separation of parents and children imposed officially from April through June of 2018 but continuing through the fall of 2019 under the government’s “zero tolerance” policy. Now a federal judge has ruled that all migrant children must be released from detention centers because of coronavirus. But immigration officials are not expected to allow parents to leave with them. Anyone with a hand in such cruel and heartless policy should be required to view the classic still-face experiment. More powerfully than any words, it shows how a parent provides an infant’s ability to literally hold themselves together. Separations beyond their ability to tolerate them threaten their very sense of existence.

Black Belonging on the 4th of July

July 4, 2020

My 96-year-old father escaped Nazi Germany at the age of 16, leaving his parents behind in a concentration camp. He has always been relentlessly hopeful, never describing his experience as trauma. But the few moments of deep pain he has let escape from a well-hidden place relate to the experience of rejection by his home country. I thought of this perspective when I listened to Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” performed by his descendants. One of them, a 15-year-old wise beyond their years, concludes with words of their own. “Somebody once said that “Pessimism is a tool of White Oppression.’ I think that’s true and I think in many ways we are still slaves to the notion that it will never get better. But I think there is hope and I think it’s important that we celebrate Black joy and Black life and we remember that change is possible, change is probable, and that there’s hope.”

Childcare at the Intersection of Prejudice and COVID-19

June 24, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fact that the health of our economy rests on the shoulders of our country’s childcare workers. The majority of the people tasked with caring for our nation’s youngest members are women of color and among the lowest paid and least valued members of our society. Children and their caregivers together bear the brunt of woefully inadequate and poorly thought out plans for reopening early education and care .

A Necessary Mess: Making Sense of George Floyd’s Senseless Death

June 5, 2020

As a White person I feel uncomfortable speaking to something which I will never fully understand. Yet staying silent does not feel right either. Perhaps the discomfort is the point. I will make mistakes I am sure. But as our book describes, through the process of moving from misunderstanding to understanding, or from “mismatch” to “repair,” relationships grow. Empathy occurs across a vast space of not-knowing. We write, “When we aim to imagine our way into other people’s experiences while acknowledging we can’t really know, we can join them.”

Preserving Emotional Health: Making Meaning in the COVID-19 Pandemic

May 24, 2020

Pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott would understand why COVID-19 threatens to bring on what has been referred to as a “shadow pandemic” in the form of a mental health crisis. Winnicott used the lovely phrase “going on being” to describe the continuous sense of self that emerges in moment-to-moment interactions in our earliest relationships and continues to evolve in new relationships over time. He described the “unthinkable anxiety” that accompanies a loss of that sense of self.

Community Trauma Prevention Starts with Parent-Infant Relationships

May 7, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has called on us to find creative ways to connect and learn. In rural western Massachusetts I had scheduled a training for 20 practitioners who work with parents and infants to meet together for two days of learning on April 15 and 16th. Instead I rapidly adapted the training to the online setting. I have had the pleasure of meeting weekly with an extraordinary group that includes peer recovery coaches on the front lines supporting moms with opioid use disorders, clinicians and administrators from Child Protective Services, physicians, occupational therapists, early intervention specialists, and early childhood educators to learn together for a course in “Community-Based Parent-Infant Relationship Support.

Parent-Newborn Relationships in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Moments of Meeting

April 22, 2020

Leila was in the early stages of labor in mid-March when she and her husband learned they would have to go it alone. They already had planned a home birth, but neither they nor their doula had yet mastered the techniques of remote healthcare as we as a society tried to find our footing amidst the chaos of the exploding pandemic.

Claudia M. Gold MD

Articles from Child in Mind