Healthy Start

Today, I went with a fellow CFS employee as she made the rounds to some teenage mothers enrolled in Healthy Start. This program works with new parents to teach them how to raise healthy babies. (The program was largely founded by Gail Breakey, whom I worked with in Hawaii.) They show them games to play, how to interact with their babies to stimulate development and, of course, how to deal with their children in effective, non-violent ways. Today, we were specifically visiting some poor moms whose babies are underweight to deliver special formula that they can't afford themselves but that will hopefully get the babies' weights to where they should be. This mother's older child is in the Healthy Start program, but there hasn't yet been a need to enroll her younger one.