Baby Hui hosts Positive Parenting Workshops in honor of Child Abuse Prevention Month

KAIMUKI—For nearly 30 years, The Baby Hui has provided peer-parenting support groups to Hawaii’s families, with the intent to meet the challenges of child-rearing and to promote positive parenting in an increasingly complicated world.

On April 19, The Baby Hui hosted “Ahh Baby, That was Helpful!” as part of a free workshop series open to the public. Located at Paki Hale, the workshop was held in honor of Child Abuse Prevention Month.

Sheila Buyukacar, Baby Hui’s executive director, presented simple parenting techniques that focus on the relationship between brain development and behavior. The session offered a brief overview of the importance of a child’s frontal lobes—the part of the brain that represents empathy, impulse management, problem solving, wisdom, and all other aspects of what we call “social intelligence.” The idea is that if the more advanced parts of the brain fail to develop properly, the brain tends to get stuck in an emotional state, which is not conducive to learning or empowerment. Worse yet, it can easily revert to its most rudimentary state, the survival state (think “fight or flight”) that is housed in the brain stem and can manifest as tantrums in toddlers and later as violence in adults.

Neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and author Richard Restak wrote about the relationship of brain damage and criminal responsibility in The Sciences, the Archives of Neurology and the Washington Post. Restack maintains that congenital defects to frontal lobe tissue affect a person’s ability to judge their actions. “If the frontal lobes are not nurtured and developed ... then we as a society can expect to pay deadly in terms of more crime, broken homes, drug use, and violence,” he wrote in 1994.

It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the strategies presented in the workshop were about making connections; the logic being that an ability to successfully connect with others helps to build the neural connections essential for healthy wiring of the brain. These strategies are deceptively simple and often run against conventional wisdom. The hope is that the sooner a parent and child learns these strategies for coping, the easier life will be for both parties during the turbulent teenage years and beyond.

Baby Hui is a 501(c)(3) organization, funded in part by the Hawaii State Department of Health, the Hawaii State Department of Human Services, and private donations.

For anyone interested in pursuing this topic, this workshop will be held again on Thursday, April 29 at Vim N’ Vigor-Waimalu from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The cost is free, but a R.S.V.P. is requested. For more information, please call (808) 779-3878 or visit http://www.thebabyhui.org/events1.html.