Does My Toddler Have Bi-polar Disorder? Unlikely, Suggests Pediatrician Claudia Gold, Author of "The Silenced Child:" But Making Time and Space for Listening Is Critical for Their Healthy Development

Claudia Gold, the author The Silenced Child, told an engaged audience at the South End library in mid-October that over the years she became increasingly concerned about the number of parents visiting her pediatric practice with a 15- or 18-month-old child who had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. It would be an unusual diagnosis at that age. But it fit with her other observation that parents seemed very anxious about something not being right with their children. Gold's stellar medical training at the University of Chicago and Albert Einstein and Montefiore in New York prepared her well for critical care of children and unusual childhood diseases, but she found herself frustrated in a medical practice where so many of her interactions turned out to be with parents who wanted to know whether their children were normal.

They asked whether they were doing the right thing, at the right time, but were overcome by fear and anxiety when their children behaved badly or were uncommunicative. "I found myself living in two worlds," Gold said, "one of developmental science; the other in which parents ask for help in a general pediatric sense, expecting me to tell them what to do, but I was not telling them to listen to their child."  She realized that the time and space necessary for listening to young children was falling by the wayside in the fast-paced lives of too many families. Worse, she said, this critically important interaction in the child's development was increasingly being replaced by medical disorder diagnoses and labeling, followed by treatment with medication, behavior management of the child, and parent education to comply with time-shortened medical advice. "The trouble with the disorder diagnosis is that children often fulfill their labels," she remarked. "Moreover, our healthcare system requires a diagnosis to get reimbursed," she added, describing as weighted toward the use of medication, 15-minute doctor visits and, in general, profits. 

Bessel van der Kolk, psychiatrist and Medical Director of the Boston Trauma Center, and Ed Tronick, Distinguished Professor Director of the Child Development Unit at UMass,Boston, chatting at the South End Writes event

Gold was introduced for her talk by South End resident Ed Tronick,  Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UMass where he directs the UMass Boston Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Certificate Program and the acclaimed Child Development Unit. After leaving her earlier practice, Gold was one of his first fellows, Tronick said. Having re-directed her career after this and other fellowships in the field of infant mental health, Gold joined a different medical practice to focus on behavioral pediatrics where, among other changes, she increased her time with patients to one hour from 15 minutes. Now the author of three books written for parents on early-childhood development, Keeping Your Child in Mind (2013), The Silenced Child (2016), and The Developmental Science of Early Childhood (2017),  she works with parents on developing skills to use time and  space to listen to their children. "Having that whole hour has a feel to it that even half an hour does not," she commented. 

Caudia Gold, signing books, and South End resident and retired pediatrician, Ben Siegel

Answering questions from the audience, Gold agreed her approach, which includes looking at children's behavior as a form of communication, is also helpful for autistic children, particularly when they are young. "They have a different way of processing the world," she said,"we have to listen to them and be curious about what they express." In addition, she said, people organized around the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) study were using her work, especially The Silenced Child. Another audience member commented he was quite impressed by how many young parents organize groups just for parents to share information, to which Tronick added  that pediatrics does not need to be part of such conversations at all. Trauma psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author The Body Keeps the Score, said his observation is that young parents who had secure upbringings would join such groups but that others, who are ashamed of what happened to them in their childhood, “become silent.”  A South End parent who had raised her child in Boston asked whether the contemporary design of strollers, with infants and young children facing outward into the world instead of inward to their caregivers' faces, as had been the case decades ago, was ever studied for impact on developmental health. Gold pointed to a 2009 New York Times article written about a study on that subject by a Scottish psychology researcher, Suzanne Zeedijk, which suggested some negative consequences, such as higher levels of stress and a faster heart rate among children facing outward in strollers. "She received an enormous amount of hate mail after it was published," recalled Gold, who thought it might have something to do with the enormous financial investments in current stroller design. 

Lynne Potts, Poet and History Scribe from Holyoke Street, Tells the Audience She Looked for Years for "a Place to Belong"

South End author and poet, Lynne Potts, had just published A Block in Time: History of Boston's South End through a Window on Holyoke, when she unexpectedly found herself interviewing Southenders for another book, one that became Faces of a Neighborhood: Boston's South End in the early 21st Century. "It was a curious process," explained Potts to a full room of interested listeners at the South End library in mid-September. "I only knew the people on my street, but they gave me some names and then I got some more names." Two years later, she had an amazing list of interviewees, including an octogenarian, a shop owner, a Villa Victoria resident, a concierge and an international arbitrator and mediator. "It was such an exciting range of people," Potts said. "I'd ask them, 'would you mind if I interviewed you about your life in the South End?' and most of them stayed with it." Faces includes twenty-five interviews of the Southenders about whose lives she began to speculate when walking through local streets and observed the various domestic scenes visible across the lit windows of early evening.

Potts's other explanation for the genesis of Faces was, in part, that she didn't quite know where she herself belonged in the landscape of her life, but knew that she wanted to belong somewhere. From growing up in Michigan to a marriage that took her to Berkeley, CA, then to a farm in Vermont, and next to an apartment on West Rutland Square as a divorced mother of young children, she found a home on Holyoke Street --where she still lives-- but never quite knew what emotional geography she was a part of. "I found myself talking to people who were clear about who they were, who had found themselves," she said. "My project became a series of little sagas, explanations of who they were and who they became. Almost all those I talked with identified with the South End's amazing cultural history, its architecture, its art, the way it was accepting of diverse sexual identities." The South End's demography in the 1980s was a rich brew of the Irish, Lebanese, Jews, African Americans and Greeks. Fifty-six percent was Caucasian; 16 percent African American. "We were proud that people from so many different walks of life lived in close proximity to those who were so different," Potts commented.

LLynne Potts signing books and chatting with her audience at the September 12 author event

The author, whose delicate stature belies an intensely engaged and observational presence, said she had written and published poetry for the last 15 years, after obtaining an MFA from Columbia University. She won several awards and edited poetry journals, including the Columbia Journal of Art and Literature and AGNI. Her curiosity about how a particular culture affects people's evolving personal lives plays out in her poems, too. Her interest was piqued when she came across a retrospective of the first American abstract painter, Arthur Dove, which led Potts to delve into his relationship with the American Modernist painter Helen Torr, both spouses of others at the time, but eventually married to each other. "Here were two painters, one male, the other female," notes Potts who studied Torr's letters, now archived at the Smithsonian. "It's about the tension of women wanting to do their own work, while men have ancient expectations," Potts said. "He shot ahead. He sold paintings. She sold just one or so. She did all the framing of his paintings. In the end, Torr quit painting herself, and was institutionalized. From there, she'd write letters saying things like, 'I'll try to be better, and help him more.'"

Some of Potts's poems are about the couple's life as she imagined it through the letters she'd scrutinized. She read aloud several poems from her collection Porthole View, inspired by the Dove/Torr relationship and their time spent living on a houseboat in Long Island Sound, including Gull with Telephone Wire, Flotsam and Tennis Ball over Gramercy Grass. And, at the request of a library audience hungry for stories about their beloved neighborhood,  also one chapter from Faces, the interview with Sebastian Alonso, of a Cuban-Peruvian immigrant background, who grew up on Shawmut Avenue in the 1980s and 1990s, and had been part of a gang.

The South End Knitters Strike Again with a Street Art Installation for June that Celebrates the Culture of Bikes, Books, Colors and Fiber in the Library’s Tremont Street Windows

The fabulous South End Knitters have installed their first exhibit in the Tremont Street windows of the South End library, a show that features a popular urban art form that counterveils the often harsh contours of our public streets’ furniture to give it a more welcoming, exciting and colorful profile. They are part of a legacy of guerilla, graffiti and stealth knitters that can be traced to Magda Sayeg, whose work with the group Knitta Please (founded in Houston in 2005) is credited with bringing sewing from the domestic circle to the street. 

Describing themselves as urban artists, the  South End Knitters’ vibrant fiber creations have beautified local fences, lamp and bicycle posts for years. The artful geometric patterns and  fiber-teased pom-poms covering the knitted bike frame in the library’s Tremont Street window combine with a quilt-shaped seat and fabric-patched bike lock, paying homage to what was generally considered a domestic form of art now claiming its rightful place in art on display in the public square.

Also known as yarn bombers, the  group participated in the deCordova Museum Biennial in 2012 for which the press release read, “When they secretly slip their colorful hand-sewn creations on fences, statues, street signs, hydrants, bicycles, and buses under cover of darkness, they humanize and prettify the urban realm; they decorate, swaddle, and in some cases, protect. They call attention to the forms they cover and remind us about our relationship to our surroundings in ways that seem far more innocuous and temporary than their painted graffiti counterparts.”

The South End Knitters are a revolving group of fiber artists of all ages, female and male, who gather in various public spaces and informal restaurants to knit, crochet and sew. Once-upon-a-time they met at Flour Bakery + Cafe on Washington Street, but more recently they have come to the Prudential Center across from the Post Office, or b.good on Dartmouth Street on Thursdays after work.  

This installation will be up for the next few weeks. It is one of a series of Tremont Street window exhibits of the Local/Focus project sponsored by the Friends of the South End Library to visually connect the library community with local artists, non-profits and creative entrepreneurs.