- Organization Name:
- Florence Crittenton Center for Pregnant and Parenting Teens
- Describe your creative piece – what is it and what has it been used for, and why is it innovative?
- A significant part of the therapeutic work we do with our young mothers is called Bonding and Attachment. In a stable, secure upbringing, children are nurtured by their primary caregivers in a way that allows them to alternate between exploration and safety. Our young mothers didn’t have that upbringing, and it is our job to teach them, through Bonding & Attachment therapy.
A key tool in our Bonding and Attachment therapy is video taping interactions between mom and baby. We place one camera on the mother, another on baby, and film their interactions. Adobe Premiere Elements allows us to display mom and baby side by side on the same screen. Talking and learning points for therapist and mom include:
• See how baby became listless and unfocused when you looked away and started to read a magazine?
• See how she brightened when you made eye contact and cooed?
• What happened when you started smiling and giggling?
• See how just being in the same room isn’t enough?
- What issue or problem were you working to address with this piece?
- The old saying “you are your mother...or father” is true. We parent the way we were parented. For most of us that’s a good thing. For others, it is something to overcome. Most of us think it is innate to coo and clap and sing to a baby...it isn’t. It is learned behavior that we pass from generation to generation. We know when a child does not experience nurturing attachment to a primary caregiver, they can lag in cognitive and emotional brain development. But our therapists were struggling with finding a way to show our young moms how they affect their babies. We needed a visual mechanism for driving our bonding and attachment therapy.
- How has your submission successfully impacted your organization’s ability to solve this issue/problem?
- With the Adobe Premiere Elements software we have been able to create videos for each of our moms and babies in-house, without the significant expense of outsourcing. The videos have allowed us to not only tell these young moms that their behavior impacts their babies, but we can now show them The split screen videos show mom in a very profound way that her eye contact, engagement, and focus on baby matters. It shows her that when she is not engaged, her baby isn’t either. It shows that baby needs mom, more than anyone else, to develop and learn. Adobe Premiere Elements helps us break the chain of poor parenting and neglect by teaching moms parenting skills.
