So tell me what’s the difference? A two-month-old puppy in a cage is deemed ‘fine’ in some circles - though not what the vet told my mother when we had our Labrador puppy many years ago: “This dog needs 10 miles a day, if you can’t do that she will have to put up with what you can offer”.

Fortunately our puppy had a big back garden to roam in and an owner who truly wanted to train her. Her owner didn’t just take her to 6 weeks of dog training classes - she did it herself day after day in our garden. That was my mother! Our puppy also had numerous opportunities to walk in the woods. (Missing from the lives of most children today!)

Somehow we all came to understand how to train a dog and we never had any problems walking our dog as children. Just as our own children understood at a very early age how to walk our friend’s dog - a simple flick of the fingers and calling her name brought her to heel!

It seems to me that the next thing on this young couple’s list will be to have a baby. Now we all know that anyone can ‘have’ a baby, you can even buy one from overseas if you can’t breed one of your own or don’t want to go through that awful pregnancy and childbirth or even a C-section. I am told that if you are adopting a baby from overseas the first seven days is the critical bonding time!!!

Wow - like me, you must be thinking “this is all getting very cynical sounding and out of hand”. However, it’s commonplace in the worlds I pass through and around - I hear these tales at least once a week.

Now ‘caging’ children and depriving them of a walk in the woods from their earliest days is perfectly acceptable to every socio-economic group. Unless you’ve worked in a daycare you cannot know how very ‘caged’ young children are - it’s really quite horrific.

If I go on I will scare some of you dedicated grandparents who frequently wonder why your grandchildren are so hard to get along with and emotionally distraught when you are together - DUH! It’s the daycare stupid!

‘Nough said.

Parents lay the foundation, good or bad, when they choose how to raise their children, particularly the choices they make in the first two years. The die is cast that early and unless a parent discovers their mistakes and works hard to rectify their child-rearing methods the problems and delays are set…for life!

Until we come to terms with the fact that it’s parents who lay the foundation with their children’s development we will never come to terms with the causes of autism, other developmental delays and a myriad of social issues we see in our lives.

Simply denying parental responsibility is ridiculous. Try reading a few memoirs or Torey Hayden’s or Dave Pelzer’s books and you might at least start understanding what I mean.

There will always be some cases where children have problems unrelated to how their parents care for them but a very high percentage of issues that parents expect everyone else and the medical and ancillary professions to take care of are caused by their own ignorance or even neglect of their children in the first year or two of life. Sometimes in such basic ways as keeping a baby clean!

I hear about it or see it every single day.

‘Endangered Minds’ by Jane M. Healy Ph.D. says it all!

It was first published in 1990, so its content is already 20 years old! My paperback copy was published in 1999 but the words inside are so very relevant to today and clearly forecast the issues I hear about and observe nearly every single day and then write about.

It is astonishing to me that just by casually checking out the used book store run by the pink ladies at our local, and life saving (for us), hospital I should discover such a book!

I am not always drawn to best sellers unless I feel the author has ‘got it’. Dr. Healy’s book may not have been a best seller in its time but it should have been a sensation. She really ‘gets it’ and she was/is way ahead of her time with her conclusions in the 20th century! Same as mine in both the 20th and 21st century!

Read it!

True confessions: After I’d spent five days in hospital following a C-section for the birth of our first son I came home to spend a week, just a week, with my husband on hand as a helper. He knew nothing yet wasn’t prepared to listen to me telling him what to do and how best to care for our newborn baby, just 6 pounds 12 ounces at birth!

I’d had a very stressful and long labour, coupled with the eventual major surgery and recovery time involved in having a C-section (often forgotten about in modern discussions of childbirth), but had a great start the next morning nursing this tiny creature, immediately named Daniel - after the Elton John song - middle name Stephen, after my brother.

I spent the next few months wondering if I would ever recover from the exhaustion. My parents came when Daniel was 3 months old - I discouraged them from coming over from England earlier to help me, despite my desperate need for tender loving care, because I knew my husband would be very jealous of their presence and I didn’t want to spoil his connection with his first born baby.

My in-laws caused inordinate stress with their weekly visits in which they did nothing, usually asking questions like: “How do you fold a queen size sheet?” or “what shall I cook for you?” - when a woman is so exhausted she needs to be nursed and cared for and know that her baby and her feeding practices (nursing or bottle fed) are being equally respected.

Despite my exhaustion, in those first weeks of recovery of December 1977 I walked our quiet road carrying this baby who virtually doubled his weight within a month! On demand nursing works! However, I didn’t have the benefit of an understanding pediatrician, nor an understanding husband and certainly not any family members to aid me. I was tired, isolated, very lonely and only when I finally got fitter could I spend many hours walking around our neighbourhood pushing our baby and singing to him laying in the lovely pram my sister-in-law had passed on to us.

However, the lifting of the baby car seat was more than I could often manage, especially with a rapidly growing baby sitting in it. The folding umbrella pushchair was awful for a tiny baby - it just squashes them and folds them up (another handmedown piece of equipment) - we should have ditched it!

So our little baby often remained in his car seat on our living room floor with me sitting in a chair, exhausted.

In hindsight I now take full responsibility for my contribution to our son’s current problems based on those early months - they really do make a profound difference!

Our beloved eldest son has today missed an international flight! By 3 minutes, according to him. He was at Heathrow airport this morning in good time but apparently just miscalculated the time he needed to go through security.

We have all done these trips for so many years by now he should know to allow sufficient time - not that he hasn’t missed cross country flights on a relatively regular basis!

However, there are three of us (his two parents and his brother) at this end trying to adjust our work lives to ensure that he’s picked up at the Miami airport, tomorrow not today. “Why?” you may ask. Because we love him and miss him and really care and that is simply what we do!

I am now gravely concerned for Daniel’s future and any relationship he may form and children he might have. I don’t see how he can bear any responsibility for a family life if he doesn’t step up to the plate now for himself.

Recognising that I was dreamy as a child and teenager I also realise that I was bossed around a lot in my youth by my mother and teachers and so it took me a while to develop my strengths - I hope I’m not too late, at least for me!

I am culpable for my son’s current issues and so it falls upon me to make it right.

I wasn’t aware of what a critical difference early care makes in the rest of a person’s life, but now I am absolutely convinced that we are being derelict in our duty as parents if we don’t do the right thing or at least ensure that those who are caring for our babies are genuinely caring and responsible, be they family or caregivers.

Now I get it - I hope I can still make a difference in Daniel’s life for the better. I’ll keep trying until my dying day. That’s my job - I’m a parent!

I recently googled ‘seizures’ again since a child in our facility had frequent ‘febrile seizures’ a year or so ago and seemed to be making progress in many regards. Yet while I was away for 3 weeks a couple of months ago he had another series of febrile seizures.

Giving the situation some thought I was interested to note in my research that ‘absence seizures’ are not uncommon. Now I know what that ‘spacey, blank stare’ look is in the same child. I believe he also frequently had ‘absence seizures’ but his mother had never drawn our attention to those (not observed by herself or her child’s pediatrician?) – I assume that neither of them was aware his blank looks could be another form of seizure. I am certain no staff members recognize such a look as a possible seizure.

I’ve seen it in other children and feel it is a response to ‘trauma’. Trauma to us maybe a car accident or a family member dying; trauma to a young child could simply be being left in their daycare without a familiar, loving, adult face around them. I believe trauma in this child’s case was his mother removing herself from the teaching environment and another teacher taking her place - in fact the mother removed the stability from the child’s life, not for the first time.

Even though the child ‘sort of’ knew the other teacher and she is a very warm person, I’m certain he didn’t get warning of the changes.

This has been the hallmark of his time at school - since he was 4 months old there has been little stability or predictability in his childcare world. There have been ‘rescuing teachers’ - those who perceive themselves as the saviour of the child, the person who can ‘con’ the child out of his distress. But such ‘conning’ isn’t a permanent fix for any child because it doesn’t work in the long term.

The thing that works, at least for this child, is TRUST. It’s what works for all children, no matter if they are in the care of a parent, family member or multiple, unpredictable, non-family caregivers.

I saw TRUST develop in the child with seizures the moment one other teacher left. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about that teacher that didn’t work in the facility. She presented quite the facade and seemed to have all the pieces as a ‘trained’, albeit very young, teacher, and yet I now realize ‘the children didn’t trust her’.

It is so hard to document these situations now that I work in a different room with another age group. But there is no doubt in my mind that someone needs to start documenting what happened to any child right before a seizure and certainly what has happened in the preceding days and weeks.

As with every anomaly that occurs in a child’s behaviour, we have to do a ‘background check’ on the circumstances leading up to the behavioural change. It’s the only way to make a genuine difference in a child’s world.

As we were growing up my father commented that we should never be reluctant to use our family doctor when needed because he, as the breadwinner for our household, paid for the service through his considerable payroll deductions. I should remark that we actually had very little need for serious healthcare attention, compared with other families we knew. But when we needed care, even emergency care, we certainly received excellent service.

Recently my mother, at 90 still living in her own house in England, spent six weeks in hospital to resolve a blood clot. Since the NHS has been around for 60+ years and is somewhat broken there were some serious frustrations for my brother, her primary carer, when trying to communicate with doctors and nurses responsible for her case - something President Obama should pay attention to!

Through the NHS my mother’s condition was satisfactorily resolved and suitable treatment established and maintained, along with officially diagnosing her with Alzheimer’s. We have asked ourselves why we kept her private health insurance coverage (now canceled) all these years “just in case” she needed ‘elective’ surgery, like an operation on her second cataract.

The current push for changes in US healthcare doesn’t seem to have taken into account the indebtedness of countries that have offered their entire populations, immigrants too, legal or illegal, nationalised healthcare for many decades! France and the UK to name just two!

Nationalised US healthcare is being pushed under the guise of needing healthcare for the one fifth of the US population without insurance. Recently I heard that about 35 million of those people will go on Medicaid under the proposed new system!

Now to my own situation - in 37 years of living in the US I have rarely had good healthcare coverage. My husband worked for his uncle’s two man company and insurance costs, for our family alone, were very expensive - at times $800 a month (paid for by the company, much to his uncle’s consternation!), and that didn’t cover much. As we frequently changed insurance companies, needing to reduce company overheads, we were obliged to change primary care physicians too - some were really good, others were just average or less.

What I did have in that time was an excellent Panamanian born pediatrician, over 15 miles from home, and a wonderful primary care doctor, located over 30 miles from our home. These physicians were rarely on our insurance plans but it was my trust in them that aided me while our children were young and at various times when I had serious queries about my own health.

We paid the regular office visit fees each time we visited them. An office visit for two children with ear infections usually came to $100 (we’re talking 1980’s!), not including medicine, which could be $25 or more. At that time I was at home educating my children and earning just $65 a week caring for one other child.

In the past 11 years our whole family has had only one year of truly comprehensive healthcare coverage. I am thankful for that because without it my husband wouldn’t have survived our family’s biggest medical emergency and trauma.

However in the past 10 years, until 18 months ago, I had no medical insurance coverage. My husband, legally disabled from his medical condition, went on Medicare about 9 years ago.

Prior to that time we had paid $500 a month for Cobra just to keep him alone insured - had we not paid that money he would have been considered as having a ‘pre-existing condition’ and been uninsurable ever again had we sought different private coverage!

Now to our current working status: My husband took a part-time (20+ hours a week) job with Starbucks at $8 an hour simply to gain basic health insurance for me - no other reason. I am extremely fit (with more energy and brain power than co-workers who are half my age!) but at 63 there is always the possibility of needing proper and effective medical coverage.

In my part-time work (6 hours most days, on occasion 9 1/2 hours a day), in early childhood care, I am paid $10 an hour but there are no healthcare or other benefits. My husband has recently increased our health insurance coverage, and thus payments, through Starbucks to $225 a month - this gives us both more comprehensive coverage (he doesn’t need more comprehensive coverage but he can’t insure me without insuring himself!).

Through his medical emergency in June 1999 we now know a doctor in just about every specialty we might ever need. Furthermore, we have abundant trust in them all. If we ever needed an expert physician in another field I know they would give us the very best advice.

I don’t want to lose any of them by being part of nationalised healthcare.

The reason I feel the need to write about our current healthcare status is to document any changes that occur in our medical and financial situation as nationalised healthcare invades the US.

Our adult sons are independent of us, but they aren’t making extraordinarily high incomes that would allow them to take out medical coverage just for the two of them - costly. Plus, one of our sons has a pre-existing neck condition. I would hate to see them each assessed a fee or fine for not ‘buying’ President Obama’s compulsory medical coverage .

Right now they at least know that we have access to the best doctors in our area should they ever need their services. I wouldn’t want them going to any other doctor just because their insurance made it cost effective.

We await the future.

Since Warners discontinued my favourite bra of the last 10 years or more, I have been struggling to keep the last two going.

One Saturday last month was the big day - and I do mean BIG! Do you know how big and ugly even small-size bras are these days? It’s been many years since I needed a pushup bra! I tend towards the conservative look now.

I just wanted a soft yet underwired bra, preferably in a natural colour, that I could buy at least four of to keep me going. I still don’t know what size I am - caused by weight fluctuations over the past 10 years. That alone was a guessing game.

I could have gone to the independent store one of my young friends uses, but do I really want an old lady saying “What a lovely pair” to me? I don’t think so.

With one bra tried on, it felt fairly comfortable, I made a big decision - three more and I’d be out of there. I made my purchase. After a month I’m not sure I got it right - only time will tell. Right after my purchase I went off on a trip to see my mother in England, I just had to buy new ones.

If they cause any problems I’ll just go through the trying on process yet again. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll have to see the old lady and get her opinion of my ‘pair’!

OH: You know the milk (breast milk) goes when you introduce solid food.

Oh give me a break! I told everyone who heard that comment: “The milk doesn’t go when you start solid food”! The ignorance in caregiving, from parents or carers, just continues to blow me away.

Just exactly what’s happening to the babies of long time nursing mothers? Some children won’t go onto solid foods until they are a year old so as to steer well clear of allergies. The majority of all children will show an interest in solid food once they can sit up and it’s entirely up to a parent as to how much solid food they introduce, what they introduce and when.

If a mother stops offering the breast for nursing because either she’s too busy, gone back to work or wants to wean the child, then obviously the milk supply will dwindle accordingly.

I have seen perfectly healthy breastfed 2 year olds, on solid food, who are able to find enough breast milk morning and evening to satisfy their needs.

I should say that the person who said ‘the milk stops’ was, at the time her milk apparently ‘stopped’, a stressed, harassed and hurried lawyer, mother of a 4 month old, going back to work and then, impulsively, opening her own daycare to provide for her child (who was then cared for by a multitude of ever-changing carers!) – all within the first six months of his life!

The mother who is still breastfeeding her 4-month-old pumps plenty of milk to keep him supplied during the day so she has no reason to stop now! Furthermore she has a pediatrician who has advised “no solids before 6 months” - how cool is that for a change?

I should also mention that her oldest child is doing amazingly well, in every regard, at 20 months or so. If she is an example of how these parents do their job then I would encourage them all the way!

See why I can’t tweet? They’d track me down!

Of course learning new computer programmes has been challenging but now that my son has set me up with some shortcuts the daily logins and communications don’t seem so daunting.

The blog writing experience here is standing me in good stead - the need for clarity and order in one’s writing is essential for college level, but I am learning all the time.

Doing an online course with other ‘mature’ students has made for an interesting group. We are also designing our own degree courses and need to reflect a lot on our life’s work - mine has been very varied!

But it feels good to read back over some of my draft blogs. Now I must choose the ones I think are most interesting.

Won’t wait so long to post in future!

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/02/autism-signs-appear-in-babies-first-year-but-parents-dont-notice.html

In my experience I believe this to be true – just within my small circle I have seen:

A 6 month old sitting in the middle of a room making no eye contact with the adult caring for her nor any toy presented to her; absolutely flat affect.

A 6 month old, when pulled up from a diaper change (most babies are using their legs to push by the time they are 3 months), whose legs collapsed like jelly when pulled up – based on my experience of babysitting her, she had spent most of her first 6 months very passively in a jiggling baby seat on the kitchen counter or lying in a portacrib with her bottle, or sleeping. She was never placed on a sheet or blanket on the floor and allowed to wiggle freely – there were no rugs on the tile floor!

A 9 month old lying on the floor of a daycare, under a fan, (first time in daycare, otherwise at home with mum) with his tongue hanging out to one side and his hands flapping! When I queried his behaviour no staff member saw his behaviour as strange and thus had no idea how to help him – except he was ‘quiet’.

He never cried except when anyone was trying to put him to sleep, at which time he screamed for ages. I knew we had to do something and became the volunteer teacher who took him outside and sat and held him, while he cried and screamed, sang to him until he finally fell asleep. He then couldn’t be laid down in the nap room because he’d wake up!
I should note that at just over 2.5 he has been calmly putting himself to sleep in the nap room for the past year. He is highly intelligent and, we now know, very conscious of strange and loud noises, plus he’s a great communicator. My work is done!

An 18 month old described by friends as ‘a funny little thing’ means that someone has already ‘identified’ that something isn’t quite right. When initially in my care in her own home she was exceedingly anxious and panic stricken - anything could startle her. I had to learn what made her tick and how to keep her home and environment calm. I’ve written about this experience on numerous occasions.

Her parents’ demeanors were not conducive in any way to this child growing in a healthy manner. The fact that she’s reached 8 years old and is doing well at school seems purely accidental! But I know the three years I worked with her made a big difference.

I have my theories!