Page 5 - BTC Yearbook 2016

Dr. Brazelton Reflects on 20 Years of Touchpoints

After 20 years of increasing success with our Touchpoints Project, I find myself both humbled and
grateful. Twenty years ago I dreamt that we might find ways to give at risk impoverished families the
support they needed in the crises we call “Touchpoints” so they could become better parents and
provide better futures for their children than they had had.

My patients in Cambridge, over the 60 years I practiced pediatrics, really provided the concept of
Touchpoints. For, having made meaningful relationships with them, I asked them to bring me a
“nugget” of how the child made it from each step in his/her development to the next. These nuggets
told me how the infant or child fell apart, wouldn’t eat, sleep, became difficult to understand, and
how they fell apart with him. Then, often to their surprise, he would pull himself together and take off
with more self-assurance to the next touchpoint. As I pooled the nuggets, I became aware of
something that I’d never been taught in child psychology classes. We were taught that children
developed in a straight line upward, but I realized from my patients’ nuggets that this wasn’t true. An
infant’s development in the first year was a jagged line of stops, falling apart, gathering steam, and
then progressing into the next stage of development. And it was obvious these times when the
infant—and parent—fell apart, were the times when we as providers could offer the support they
needed to help them adjust to their child’s next step in development. For these were the times where
the parent was most vulnerable and in need of help.

1. The next step was to make these concepts available to professionals or people who
worked with young families and could support them through these critical periods.
Ann Stadtler, John Hornstein, Ed Tronick, and I began to develop the intervention
model and identified the concepts that we are now using: Parents are the most
important person to their children and they will be raising the child, not us. Our job is
twofold:
a. To encourage and support the parents to increase their self-esteem so they can
pass it onto the child;
b. To never talk down to or try to tell the parents what they should be doing but
instead to encourage them to tell you what they can do, and what they want for
their child.
2. Positive thinking. Always look for the positive and realize how any negative remarks
can undermine a parent.
3. Use the child’s behavior as your language, and if possible, demonstrate the newborn’s
behavior as a way of helping them get to know the baby as an individual. Even if he’s
an at-risk child or infant with a disability, helping a parent to understand his behavior
from the beginning can make an enormous difference to his eventual outcome.
4. Start as early as possible to make an important relationship by using the baby’s
behavior captures every parent’s passion.
5. Assure the parents that you will be available at each “Touchpoint” or any time that
they may need you and give them a way to reach you.
6. Predict the times when they will be stressed by the baby’s regression and
unpredictable behavior, and offering them your support to help them through each of