Term's End Baby Care Committee Report

"Helping build babies brains is the most important job parents have: thankfully, it is also the most pleasureable, because the brain is literally constructed with loving interactions.  Leaving babies to cope with stressful situations alone won't toughen them up or teach them to be independent.  Infants' brains are exquiaitely designed to develop under the guidanceo f an adult brain: all of their senses need to be anchored to this brain.  Keeping this anchor steady allows your baby's brain to forge the pathways needed to become a happy, loving, and resilient adult."
 p. 64, HELPING BABY SLEEP...the science and practice of gentle bedtime parenting, by Gethin and Macgregor.



Our shared Book Application Collaborative this term conducted internships with Global Parent homes based on the research gathered by Gethin and Macgregor in HELPING BABY SLEEP...the science and practice of gentle bedtime parenting.

 Our high school programming is unique at this point in the global sphere.  Eduardo's Contribution of Great Merit promises to expedite the marketing and adoption of  illuminary curriculum and illustrious pedagogy by playing them forward electronically in a multitude of networking ways over the next five years.  Our world peace deserves this catalyst.  


Our mentors, professors, give us direct and simulated exposure to families who practice ways that match the research in attachment security and healthy brain development.  We gain worldly experience through playing our learning forward with diverse families throughout New York City.  In every borough, here we are!

Our internships give us opportunities to support and educate families who normally don't find the time or know-how on their own to connect all the dots published by research communities.  Their schedules or backgrounds have limited them to accept only the highly commercialized and unfortunately popularized "sleep training"of old.  Parents, however,  once updated and "demythed" become truly grateful to have help in switching gears.  They express that sleep "training" really went against their natural grain as parents attuned to their vulnerable infants. They are happy to once again pay attention to their intuitive sense that letting babies just cry it out -sometimes for hours- made no sense and was indeed painful as well for parents otherwise attuned to their babies' frightful wails of anxious suffering.

Our internship families thus selected the paragraph above as the most convincing to share with new parents and parents to be over the next six months in their neighborhoods and clinics (This is the commitment they make to recieve internships support in their homes for a semester ... they promise to play the good forward where they live, work, and participate in services throughout neighborhoods!).

Reason for outside rules ... as told by Laura Ingalls Wilder

    "The fact was that Almanzo was nineteen years old.  But that was a secret because he had taken a homestead claim, and according to the law a man must be twenty-one years old to do that.  Almanzo did not consider that he was breaking the law and he knew he was not cheating the government.  Still, anyone who knew that he was nineteen years old could take his claim away from him.
     Almanzo looked at it this way: the Government wanted this land settled; Uncle Sam would give a farm to any man who had the nerve and muscle to come out here and break the sod and stick to the job until it was done.  But the politicians far away in Washington did not know the settlers so they must make rules to regulate them and one rule was that a homesteader must be twenty-one years old.
     None of the rules worked as they were intended to.  Almanzo knew that men were making good wages by filing claims that fitted all the legal rules and then handing over the land to rich men who paid their wages.  Everywhere, men where stealing the land and doing it all according to the rules. "
(The Long Winter, p. 99)

While we voice an intention (settle the land ... raise test scores), we may inadvertently leave lots of room  for squatters, birds of prey, insects and rodents to take up "residence."  Unless we follow through, follow up with persistent, sequential efforts that exercise our power of imagination,  our dreamship  may simply serve as a vacant structure, remaining hollow and ill-defined, or unpredictably super-charged and chaotic.   

To fulfill our dreams once named we do well to further exercise our willpower to revisit and revise and reorganize according to our current inspiration and good judgment.  We do well to take the time needed to allow wisdom within to make right choices ...  deftly detailing, comprehensively crafting, accurately articulating the nature of that which we intend.  

The more fully we practice detecting and articulating these authentic qualities, the more "real" our "dreamship" becomes.  Ultimately, its tangible presence invites us to assume our captaincy ... smell the salty air, board this magnificent vessel, assemble our crew, prepare to leave port and set sail for the journey of our lives! Only when we activate and sustain exercise of  our powers -will, order, wisdom, insight, judgment, enthusiasm (six to begin building with this week).

(How Dreams Really Do Come True, by Harmony Brook @Palladio High -Tenthyear).