Newswise — David Riley's work has reached thousands of children and parents across Wisconsin and the country, but for him, a chance conversation at a pizza parlor was a powerful reminder of what his efforts really mean.
Several years ago, Riley complimented a mother with two young boys in tow on her parenting skills as they waited in the restaurant line. He went on to ask what books or magazines she had consulted, and she described a newsletter she was receiving in the mail; Riley quickly realized it was his.
Riley, a child development specialist with University of Wisconsin-Extension and a professor of human development and family studies in the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology, is the lead author and project director for "Parenting the First Year." The series of 12 instructional newsletters, available in English and Spanish, now reaches more than 26,000 Wisconsin households each year - almost half of all new parents - providing ideas, support and reassurance.
During their chat, the mother recounted how one week earlier, her baby was crying inconsolably one night and she was "ready to do anything to make that baby stop," including using physical force. But then she remembered a line from the newsletter: "Baby doesn't cry to make you feel bad. Baby cries because she feels bad."
"Immediately - instead of being angry - she felt sorry," Riley says. "It didn't change the situation, but it changed the meaning of the situation for her. In that case, that one sentence was working exactly as we had intended that sentence to work."
A study of the newsletter's impact found parents who received it changed their beliefs, becoming less like parents who had abused their children, and they reported slapping or spanking their babies significantly less often than parents who did not receive the newsletters. "It actually helped me step back and see things from the child's point of view which, in turn, made me more understanding and patient," wrote one parent from Wood County in northern Wisconsin. Parents have rated it a more useful source of advice than their own parents, their friends, their physician and nurses.
"We don't live in traditional communities that have one blueprint of how to raise children, and so many of us are lost," Riley says. "And many families today are socially isolated from help and advice, so we need to invent new ways to connect people to good advice."
The newsletters are written in simple language, but are also steeped in child psychology research, based on observations of parents and their children. "We're psychologists," Riley says. "We know a lot about how people think and how they change the way they think."
"Parenting the First Year" newsletters feature a column written in baby's voice, to help parents better understand and respond to the needs of their children. In the first few months, it includes statements such as "I may quiet when someone picks me up and cuddles me" or "I feel happy, sad or uncomfortable at times."
"Learning to take the baby's perspective helps parents decode baby's signals, and that's one of the keys to sensitive parenting," Riley says.
Riley, who studied psychology as an undergraduate, first became interested in working with young children after working as a Head Start teacher in East Los Angeles, part of three years of alternate service due to his religious objections to being drafted for the Vietnam War.
In 1986, a UW-Madison graduate student working with Riley, Dori Schatell, proposed a newsletter for parents after seeing others and realizing they could do much better. Schatell helped Riley secure startup funds from the Children's Trust Fund, an organization charged with preventing child abuse and neglect.
Today there are about 80 separate distribution networks in the state. They include hospitals, public health departments and service organizations, including 100 Kiwanis Clubs. They raise about $250,000 a year for printing and postage, partnering with UW-Extension to deliver the newsletters to their communities. Riley and his team also produce "Parenting the 2nd & 3rd Years" as well as a prenatal series, "Preparing to Parent."
"Here on campus, this has been a no-budget project for the most part, something we just do on our own time," Riley says. After two decades, half of Wisconsin children have been raised by a parent who received the newsletters, Riley says.
Children's Service Society of Wisconsin (CSSW) sends out the newsletters in both English and Spanish, with a grant from United Way of Dane County, to 60 families with children under 1 year old and 150 families with children between the ages of 1 and 3.
"Some caregivers, especially first-time caregivers, have never had to deal with a crying baby, a teething toddler, a bored 2-year-old," says Lizzie Sexton, CSSW community outreach coordinator. "This newsletter helps them to feel less alone and also teaches them more about what their child is going through and how to deal with it."
New parents also enjoy reading the benchmarks of where their children should be developmentally, along with ideas for toys they might like to play with and how to make their homes safer for their babies, says Holly Halberslaben, director of family care suites at St. Mary's Hospital in Madison. The hospital is one of 77 statewide that distributes the first-year newsletter to parents who deliver there, as well as follow-up newsletters from Riley's program the second and third years.
"It's kind of exciting to read each month what's going to be happening with your baby," she says.
The newsletter was the first bulletin of the UW-Extension to be translated into Spanish and for which it sold licenses to other groups to reproduce on their own under their own name. The newsletter is now distributed in about a dozen other states as well as Canada and Great Britain.
"When former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife had their last baby, they received the UK version of a newsletter written in Wisconsin at this campus," Riley says.
While the newsletters are based on established research, they are updated to account for changes in immunizations, infant diet, safety and other issues.Jenny Grether is program coordinator for Dane County Early Childhood Initiative, which works in challenged neighborhoods in Sun Prairie and on Madison's southwest side. The program's social workers use the newsletters when meeting with families and it helps tremendously to have them available in Spanish, she says.
"A third of our families at each site are Spanish-speaking only," she says. "That's a big bonus."
Joan Laurion, Dane County extension agent, frequently gets requests for additional copies for people to share with friends or relatives in other states. New mothers also tell her "it's the only thing my husband will read." One woman said, "I put it in the bathroom." Laurion says many UW-Extension programs are targeted at certain populations or pockets of people, but "this program is for everybody."
For Riley, the program is a definite career highlight.
"I've done other work that people respected. This is the only scholarly work I've done that people loved," Riley says. "Many of us get into our fields of study in the first place to make the world better, and it's very, very nice to see that happening, not just in the long-term, but this year."
NOTE TO EDITORS: This story is one in a series of profiles of The Wisconsin Idea in action, For more, visit http://www.wisconsinidea.wisc.edu/.
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