Ferguson continued the lecture in the squad room.
The third Boston Basic: count, group, and compare. “That’s laying the foundation for mathematics,” he said. “It’s an intellectual breakthrough for a toddler when they understand that numbers correspond to groups of things. Four is not just a word you say after three and before five.”
Fourth: explore through movement and play. “We want to tell parents: pay attention to what your kids are interested in. When they’re playing, they’re not just wasting time.”
The fifth Basic is to read and discuss stories. “People talk a lot about reading to little kids, but they don’t talk about discussing things with little kids, getting those thinking wheels turning in their heads,” he said. “Ask them, ‘Why do you think the character did that? What do you think’s going to happen next? How would you finish writing the story?’”
Each of the Boston Basics grew out of decades of research on optimal child development. Each one builds a strong connection between parent and child. Each one lays the foundation for verbal and math skills, secure attachment, physical fitness, and mental health.
The Achievement Gap Initiative aims to blanket the city with these five simple messages and to reinforce them in multiple venues, including doctor’s offices during well-baby visits, churches, barber shops, housing developments, and community health centers. In maternity wards, nurses teach parents the Boston Basics before they’re discharged with a new baby. And now beat cops would share them as they patrolled the neighborhood.
“We’re not trying to fix anyone. We’re not saying people are broken in any way. We’re just saying we know some stuff, and if you do this, your babies can have better lives,” Ferguson told them. “This is an opportunity for all of us. We’re trying to saturate the entire community. We want it to be impossible that if you live in Boston you don’t know about the Basics.”
The effort builds on a model of social pediatrics in which health care providers and civic leaders join together to help parents change their behavior in ways that benefit children. One famous example is the “Reach Out and Read” campaign, which enlisted pediatricians to combat illiteracy. Dr. Barry Zuckerman founded Reach Out and Read in 1989; he’s also involved in the Boston Basics.
Ferguson and his colleagues have developed a website and videos in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. They’re creating an app that will push out suggestions for activities and interactions at each stage of a child’s development—sort of gamifying the infant-raising process. Already, interest in other cities, including Ossining, New York, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, has led to parallel efforts, as well as an umbrella group called The Basics National Network. Ferguson hopes that eventually the Boston Basics will become part of the standard routines of each institution that becomes a partner in propagating the Basics.
“What the society needs is something that can go to scale, something that can reach everybody,” Ferguson told me on the phone, when I was planning the trip. “People’s lives are already crowded with folks trying to get them to do stuff.”
Ferguson’s grandmother—a special education teacher—made sure to enrich his childhood in Cleveland in the 1950s and 1960s. When he was twelve and learning the clarinet, she took him to a Duke Ellington concert. She brought him and his three brothers to events with her college sorority. Her encouragement led him to art and dance lessons at Cleveland Karamu House, a black arts center. She herself had benefited in her childhood from exposure to the broader world and culture at the Phyllis Wheatley settlement house, which became her after-school refuge. Then she met and married Ferguson’s grandfather, a dapper man who was refined but liked to drink and smoke cigars.
“She didn’t go as far in school or do as much in life as she probably would have if she hadn’t met my grandfather,” he told me later in the same day he spoke to the Mattapan police. We were sitting together in his Harvard office. “In some ways, I was the realization of aspirations that she had had but never completely lived out.”
He recalled visiting in her living room with her stepfather, a former Pullman porter who was about ninety-four years old at the time. Ferguson was perhaps twenty-five, had a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, and was enrolled in graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the wonder child, carrying the family’s hopes.
“He had watched me grow up. I was in the PhD program at MIT, and I was doing well. I think he identified vicariously and thought about where I was compared to what he had experienced in life. There were things that he wasn’t allowed to do, but I was being allowed to do them,” he said.
Ferguson wrote a poem about that conversation, “Sacred Words from a Great-Grandfather.” He swiveled to the computer screen and pulled up the poem.
When I was in my twenties
Like you,
There was a lot’a things
They wouldn’t let a black man do.
Now that things have changed,
My life is nearly over.
But I’m not sad about it.
Your soul and mine are one,
And we’re still gonna make it.
I want the best for you;
And I want you
To want the best for yourself.
Don’t stop tryin’.
Don’t stop believin’ in yourself.
Don’t stop scratchin’ and clawin’
And pullin’ and sweat’n
And above all
Don’t stop
Don’t stop rememberin’–
That I love you.
Ferguson writes a lot. He and project coordinator Jocelyn Friedlander wrote the script for every Boston Basics video. He narrated the English-language ones too. As he shared more of his poetry with me, I realized I was receiving a tour of his career of the last twenty years. As I evaluated him, I gathered that he was sussing me out too.
Ferguson is a preacher as much as a poet; he often writes a few verses to deliver in a speech to preschool teachers or math educators. Every piece carries a message, sometimes explicitly linked to a concept in educational theory. One poem responds to educators who are reluctant even to discuss underperforming students’ problems, for fear of seeming racist, and who focus instead on the positives.
Later in the day, we drove to a “fatherhood summit” sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families at a nondescript Doubletree hotel in Westborough, a western suburb of Boston. Driving down the Mass Pike, Ferguson pointed out a digital billboard, with huge images of the Boston Basics, on the site of another partner, WGBH, the New England PBS affiliate. At the conference, he schmoozed with nonprofit and local government officials, all of whom were seeking to engage fathers more deeply in the lives of their children and convince them “to give up trying to get over, and shift to trying to get ahead,” as Ferguson said to one small group of attendees. (“To get over” is slang for exploiting a situation or the system.)
Ferguson left the event with the business card of a facilitator whom he thought could be a good Boston Basics trainer as well as a contact from the Cape Verdean community who might be able to recruit a volunteer to narrate the videos in Cape Verdean Creole. (I later learned that facilitator became the program director managing dissemination of the Basics in Boston.) With limited resources and a long timeline—it would take perhaps three years for the program to permeate Boston—Ferguson was always looking to win allies and volunteers to the cause of nurturing parents.
In the nine hours I spent shadowing Ronald Ferguson, he consumed only food purchased from Dunkin’ Donuts while hurrying from one meeting to another—an egg-and-cheese sandwich with orange juice for breakfast and chicken salad on flat bread with apple juice for lunch. By the end of the day he was tired—it was a Monday but felt like a Friday, he said.
A’ZAYAH RUSSELL RUSHED UP TO the couch where I was sitting with his mom, Jasmine. His tiny fist clutched her phone. Bare brown legs thrust forward in that unbalanced, stiff-legged walk typica
l of toddlers. He wore a diaper and a lime green Boston Public Health Commission T-shirt.
He slipped, then started wailing.
“Whoopsies,” Jasmine said. A’Zayah pushed up to standing again. “You okay? Did you have a boo-boo?”
In response, he grabbed Jasmine’s second phone. “As long as he don’t call 911, I’m fine. Or call anybody from the Boston Housing Authority,” she joked.
Dashing away, he slipped again. Thump. This time the cries were about pain, not protest.
Jasmine reached down and pulled A’Zayah onto her lap.
“You okay? Are you okay?”
A’Zayah said something I couldn’t understand.
“You hurt your knee? Okay.” Jasmine gave him a big cuddle, gauging the weight of his diaper at the same time. “Did you already wet your diaper?”
He mumbled again.
“I know, ba-ba,” said Jasmine, a thirty-four-year-old woman with dark-rimmed librarian glasses, long braids, and a snug T-shirt over bedazzled jeans.
Apparently comforted, he pushed away from his mom. He grabbed for the Thomas the Train set on the floor of the dark living room. A wet breeze floated through the open window.
Young children touch base with their parents constantly throughout the day, to get information or reassurance. This healthy give-and-take, the blend of connection and encouragement, will build A’Zayah’s ability to self-regulate.
Jasmine was telling me about her first exposure to the Boston Basics. Her advocate at the Boston Public Health Commission, Lori Caiby, showed her one of the videos and told her to pick up A’Zayah as much as she wanted.
That surprised Jasmine. Her relatives always warned her that you’d spoil babies by picking them up every time they cried.
She seized on Lori’s encouragement to disregard those voices. It felt natural to respond to her baby’s needs. From the time he was born, she loved stripping them both down for skin-to-skin contact, which studies have shown reduces infant crying, improves mother-baby attachment, and boosts successful breast-feeding. She ignored her grandmother’s concern that he’d catch a cold. She just bundled them both in a blanket.
But she was still figuring out the “manage stress” part of the first Basics point. She’s a single mom taking care of a sick boy, living in a housing project in Charlestown with only her grandmother for help. When she discovered she was pregnant, she’d had to leave the rooming house where she was staying because of a no-family policy. “When you’re pregnant, it’s supposed to be one of the happiest times in your life,” she said. “That was the hardest time.”
She bounced around on friends’ couches for about a year before getting the subsidized apartment in Charlestown, when A’Zayah was five months old. A’Zayah has a metabolic disorder, and at the moment was sick with bronchitis. That was on top of ear surgery in February, just a month after he turned two. It was April now.
“He was going deaf. He had tubes put in,” she said. “He had about ten ear infections in one year.”
“Mommy, Mommy,” A’Zayah interrupted, holding up a train.
“Those are some of the stressors,” Jasmine said.
“Mommy, Mommy.”
“Yes, my baby. Did you want Mama?” Jasmine looked over to admire A’Zayah’s construction.
“High-five,” she said.
They slapped hands.
“Awesome work. I love you. High-five.”
Another hand slap. “Choo choo,” A’Zayah said. He turned back to the trains.
“The thing that struck me. A lady by the name of Betty, she found a thirty-million-word gap or something to that nature. That struck me.”
“Choo choo.”
Jasmine’s phone rang, but she silenced it after a glance.
“When we have disadvantaged children, they hear less words than children that are more advantaged,” she said. “I kind of knew from my background with children that you read with your child, when you’re pregnant. They start to hear you at five to six months, in utero. I read to him when I was pregnant. I used to always grab a book, any book I could get my hands on. He’s very, very smart, even though he’s a tad delayed on communication, due to his hearing.”
Jasmine knows about child development from working for years at different schools, from preschool to third grade, in addition to assorted customer service jobs. She served as a substitute teacher in a Catholic school in Brockton and then ran the after-care program. The school called her back as a paraprofessional in kindergarten for two years. Between 2003 and 2009, she earned forty credits in early childhood education at Massasoit Community College and Quincy College, a community college in Dorchester. She hopes to go back to school and get an associate’s degree.
Nowadays, she helps out at Jump Start while A’Zayah is in day care, in return for a stipend and credit for performing community service. So far, that’s satisfied the Department of Transitional Assistance requirements to continue her food and housing benefits. She contributes to the Jump Start team planning meeting, preparing lessons on reading for enjoyment and reading for reconstruction. They supervise preschoolers in dramatic play, puzzles, writing, arts, and other areas.
Jasmine is fortunate. Some low-income moms can’t manage to get vouchers for day care, Caiby told me the previous day when I visited her office at the Public Health Commission. Without day care, children start kindergarten seriously behind their peers—unless the parents take their babies out, socialize them, and expose them to enriching activities.
Jasmine also fields nonstop emails and phone calls in her role as president of the community board, which is negotiating a redevelopment of the community with the housing authority and developers. And she runs a popular playgroup in Mattapan, about an hour away by bus. That’s how I first saw her name: on the playgroup flyer distributed at the Mattapan police station.
Other Boston Basics points come naturally to Jasmine. “I try to talk to him as much as I can, especially when we’re outside.”
She’s teaching A’Zayah sign language. Since ten months of age, he pointed to everything, the first developmental step in associating words with objects.
While we were talking, A’Zayah was fussing under the couch. Then he disappeared into another room. He returned now with a plastic light saber. I tried to play Jedi with him, but he was not having it.
“No!”
I looked at Jasmine, puzzled. A’Zayah swept the light saber through the skirt of the couch. Not exactly attacking it. Not playing pretend. Frustrated.
Comprehension dawned on me. I took the light saber and used it to fish under the couch for a lost train.
A smile broke across A’Zayah’s face. He grasped the train.
“Say thank you,” Jasmine said.
“Ta ta.”
“That’s how he says thank you,” she said.
“That’s his little broom,” explained Dorothy Russell, Jasmine’s grandmother, who had been sitting in a nearby rocking chair.
A’Zayah’s upbringing differs from Jasmine’s own. Her mom got pregnant with her at age sixteen, then proceeded to have nine more children, the youngest of whom is now ten. Taking care of her siblings probably kept Jasmine from getting into trouble herself, but it wasn’t much fun for her as a teenager.
“How I grew up? Very rough. I don’t mean for my life, I just mean in the sense of being a household of ten people,” Jasmine said. “I was the live-in babysitter for my mom, taking care of all my brothers and sisters. There wasn’t really a life for me. I was always in the house.”
She wants A’Zayah to have a different experience. Already, they go out whenever she can—to museums, the aquarium, playgroups, or even just for a walk. She has signed up for every free study and intervention she can find, from “Healthy Baby” through the Public Health Commission to “Smart from the Start” and Union Capital Boston, a loyalty program that gives social and financial service rewards when participants are engaged in the community.
Jasmine doesn’t understand friends of he
rs who sit around indoors with their babies or feel reluctant to express physical affection.
“I’m all over my son. I’m hugging him, I’m kissing him,” she said. “The bonding starts there.”
CAMILA CULLEN SAT IN A rocking chair in her children’s darkened bedroom on the third floor of her townhouse in the quickly gentrifying Petworth neighborhood of Washington, DC, listening to the faint strains of Pandora’s “Hipster Holidays” channel playing on an iPad in the hallway.
“My love, what was your favorite part of the day today?” she asked Mariana, seven, and Alejandro, four. This is the kids’ bedtime routine, what Mariana calls “the debrief,” when they share their favorite and least favorite parts of the day, one thing they did well and one thing they could improve. They all talked in quiet voices, Camila in Spanish and the children answering in a mix of Spanish and English.
Mariana didn’t like getting sick with a fever after school. Alejandro didn’t like when a car nearly hit him, backing up. Mariana liked the afternoon with Mama. Alejandro was proud of cooking dinner. Mariana congratulated herself for taking a break in a different classroom instead of just wandering off in the hallway when she was feeling overloaded at school. Camila punctuated their comments with questions and murmured remarks. Then she said a gentle “buenas noches” and, with a sigh of relief, slipped into the hallway, where I was waiting.
What a change in just a few months. Earlier in the fall, about six months after finishing the PEP class, the family had truly gone off the rails. The kids dug in their heels at every normal part of the routine: mornings, after-school, homework, bedtime. Everything was a battle. After their parents put them to bed, the kids would turn on the lights, play music, dance around their rooms, and make a mess. If Camila and her husband failed to notice, the kids would inform them the next morning: “We were angry, we threw a party.” (That had brought Camila to the low point described in Chapter 1.)
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 13
