The 21st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How to Do It, released this week, is touted as the first anthology of its kind. Published by , it features more than 80 chapters representing motherhood organizations from around the globe.

“We need to encourage people to look at motherhood as an autonomous social movement, much in the same way feminism has been framed in the past,” says the book’s editor, 91��ɫ women's studies Professor Andrea O’Reilly in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

“Mothers are becoming activists out of necessity,” she says. “Being a mother is still one of the most demanding jobs out there; we need to keep pushing for a shift in thinking so the roles and responsibilities of motherhood are given the value they deserve. Motherhood organizations, such as the ones profiled in this book, empower mothers to transform the society in which they live in order to improve their own lives.”

Part of this challenge is tackling “invisimomibility” – the chronic and pervasive undervaluing of mothers’ unpaid care giving. “This leads to an inability to successfully fulfill one's care giving, civic and paid work responsibilities and leaves primary caregivers vulnerable to social and economic risk,” says O’Reilly.

Conversely, the term “mamazon” was coined to describe mothers who refuse to become invisible. “We’re talking about moms who aren’t afraid to engage in non-traditional behaviours – to be loud, angry and assertive,” she says.

The 976-page book is divided into seven sections: Becoming a Mother; Maternal Identities; Maternal Advocacy; Maternal Activism; Violence, Militarism, War and Peace; Social Change and Social Justice, and Writing/Researching/Performing Motherhood. It features prominent organizations such as Moms Rising, Mocha Moms, and LGBTQ Parenting Network.

The volume also provides an overview of the history and ideological frameworks of the 21st century motherhood movement, discusses the challenges and possibilities of maternalism, and details the specific practices and strategies of maternal activism.

“The writings in this anthology show how the 21st century motherhood movement has opened the door to a mother-centered theory and politic of feminism,” says O’Reilly. “Motherhood is a crucial aspect of feminism that we need to continue to explore both through activism and research.”

By Melissa Hughes, media relations officer. Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Encourage him to read novels. Ongoing studies at 91��ɫ [by psychology Professor Raymond Mar and colleagues in the Faculty of Health] show that people who read more fiction than nonfiction score higher on empathy tests.

Why?

Researchers theorize that the parts of the brain we use to understand how fictional characters feel are the same ones we use to figure out how real people feel. And the more we use those parts of our brain, the stronger our ability to understand others.

See YFile for more coverage of Mar's research.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Pregnant with her third child, she was conducting a series of interviews as research for the play, , on loss and how it is transformed, when she lost her son Ethan. “I was just struck by how I was immersed in this phenomena and living it at the same time,” she says. I'm Still Here was co-created with 91��ɫ nursing Professor Gail Mitchell and playwright Vrenia Ivonoffski.

Right: Christine Jonas-Simpson, holding the children's book she wrote, Ethan's Butterflies

Ethan was stillborn at 38 weeks – or, as Jonas-Simpson prefers to say, born still – causing a rent in the universe as she knew it. After the loud silence of her delivery, she remembers hearing a primal scream of agony, realizing some moments later it was coming from her.

Almost a decade later, Jonas-Simpson is about to premiere her third research-based documentary film, about how mothers and their families live with the loss of a child. The premiere will take place Sunday, May 15, from 1 to 3:30pm at the Fox Theatre, 2236 Queen St. E. in Toronto. Tickets are $25 per ticket with proceeds going to Bereaved Families of Ontario-Toronto. To buy tickets, call 416-440-0290 or e-mail info@bfotoronto.ca.

Enduring Love looks at the lives of four women, the agony of loss, the impact the death of their infant has had on them and their families and how they learned to live with their loss. It also traces the importance of recognizing their other children are also grieving, the continuing presence of their deceased child in their lives, the rituals they’ve developed and how they not only endured but have been transformed by their loss. Funded by 91��ɫ's Faculty of Health and the Health Leadership & Learning Network: Interprofessional Education Initiative Fund, the documentary answers the research question, what is the meaning of living and transforming with loss for mothers who experience the loss of their baby?

As one woman in the film says of her family, it was a “seminal event in their lives”; there was a before and an after. The women make the point that many fail to realize that losing their baby, whether at 24 weeks gestation or several weeks after delivery, is a profoundly felt loss that changes, not only them, but their husbands and their children, forever. One of the universally hard moments for these women was going home from the hospital without their baby. It feels so unnatural, says Jonas-Simpson.

It was the experience of losing her own son that guided Jonas-Simpson’s research toward providing a body of arts-based research for others who experienced perinatal loss. She had often used music in her nursing practice and research, and then began incorporating art, drama and film. “With grieving and loss it seemed appropriate to keep going with the arts.” Although, she will write papers on her latest research, she believes presenting her findings with an art-based approach makes it more accessible and touches people in a way a research paper in a journal wouldn’t. “It’s a way of showing the human experience, rather than just telling,” she says.

Being a researcher, I looked at the literature to see what was out there. I was struck by how little there was out there in light of grieving and loss about mothers’ lived experiences. My graduate student, Jennifer Noseworthy, and I are conducting a comprehensive literature review and we’ve only found a few qualitative studies focused on the human lived experience of perinatal loss.” And that moved Jonas-Simpson to conduct research and create resources for others like her.

Enduring Love is her third film. Her first was , while her second, is a short made from footage shot for Enduring Love, which focuses on the surviving children. “These children have an incredible bond and relationship with the babies,” their siblings who’ve died. Jonas-Simpson recently gave a talk and showed Why Did Baby Die? at a Women's Health and Mental Wellbeing Speakers Series event at 91��ɫ.

Some of the children, as seen in Enduring Love, have drawn family portraits years later that have included their deceased siblings. “Grieving and loss isn’t always something we talk about openly, but it is experienced by many, if not all, of us,” says Jonas-Simpson. Even after the physical death, the relationship continues. “It’s still hidden. Perinatal loss is also disenfranchised in our society.” To help grieving children with the loss of a baby sibling, she also wrote the children's book .

Jonas-Simpson started talking about her own experience of losing Ethan, born with vibrant red locks, and how her other two sons, now 11 and 13, have integrated him into their lives as a way to help others. “The children integrate this loss very well,” she says. One of her children even wrote a letter to Ethan as a school assignment, asking if there are dinosaurs in heaven and if it hurt to die. The teacher may have been uncomfortable, but Jonas-Simpson says it’s important to talk about and to understand the continuing relationship following death.

Next, she is hoping to do research on children age three to 18 who are grieving a loss of a baby sibling. Children, she says, are often forgotten about, but they too grieve. “If we can be more open about grief and loss as a natural human experience and if we can begin in the schools with that,” it could be really helpful for the children, she says. She would also like to explore the common and unique threads of grieving around the world.

For more information or to view or buy Jonas-Simpson’s films, visit the Faculty of Health’s Living and Transforming with Perinatal Loss website.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The federation is making the change – which affects players between the ages of 6 and 21 – in an effort to create a safer environment for new players to develop skills. The rule change affects house league and select players in most of the province, though Ottawa and Thunder Bay aren't governed by the OHF.

91��ɫ health professor Alison Macpherson, who was among the first researchers to call for bodychecking to be disallowed in recreational hockey, called it a great first step. "I know some parents keep their kids out of hockey, especially out of competitive hockey, because they worry about the injuries that might ensue when kids are allowed to bodycheck," she said Thursday.

Until now parents who wanted their child to play non-contact hockey didn’t have many options, said Macpherson. “There is pretty good scientific evidence that bodychecking, especially under the bantam level (age 13-14), leads to injury in youth ice hockey,” she said.

A study published last year found kids who were bodychecked were about 2.45 times more likely to suffer an injury than kids who didn’t play with body contact and 1.7 times more likely to suffer a concussion, she said. “Kids are more likely to play if they think they’re not going to get hurt,” said Macpherson. “Which is great because we have an obesity epidemic.”

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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When Christine Jonas-Simpson’s son Ethan was born, there was an eerie quiet in the delivery room, and then a piercing wail, wrote .

“The only cry I heard was my own,” she said somberly.

Ethan was dead, “born still” in the language of grieving parents; “stillborn” in the medical vernacular. The umbilical cord was constricted, essentially suffocating the baby in the womb, a condition impossible to detect with an ultrasound.

Jonas-Simpson, who was almost 38 weeks pregnant, knew her son was dead before she went into labour. When he was born, she held Ethan in her arms, stroking his shock of curly red hair. So did her husband.

The nurses were wonderfully supportive, even explaining to Ethan’s young siblings how his air tube was broken, something that could happen to an astronaut. The family was able to mourn on their terms.

(Jonas-Simpson, a professor of nursing at 91��ɫ [Faculty of Health], published a children’s book, , and produced a series of research papers and documentaries on stillbirth, the latest of which, Enduring Love: Transforming Loss, will .)

[You can also watch the channel.]

Unlike Ethan, most babies born still are quickly “disposed of” without being held, named or given a funeral. In much of the world, reproduction is central to a woman’s purpose, so there is profound stigma, and no small measure of blame falls on the mother when childbirth fails to produce a living child.

Newly published data show there are more than 2.6 million stillbirths worldwide each year. The deaths remain largely uncounted, the mothers unsupported and preventive measures understudied.

It is an epidemic – one that claims more lives each year than HIV-AIDS and malaria combined – that quietly unfolds far from the public eye.

The Lancet, in its Thursday edition, has published that aim to shatter the silence by examining the staggering toll of stillbirth – emotional, physical and economic – and proposing practical solutions.

A stillbirth, as defined by the World Health Organization, is one in which a baby dies after reaching at least 28 weeks gestation and weighing at least 1,000 grams. In a country like Canada with advanced medical care, it is 22 weeks at 500 grams. (Loss of a fetus before that time is considered a miscarriage or, if the pregnancy is terminated, an abortion.)

There is a common belief that babies who die in utero were never meant to live. Stillbirths have been seen as a form of natural selection, bad luck, the result of witchcraft – lame 17th-century explanations for a lingering 21st-century scourge.

The other myth is that most stillbirths occur early in the pregnancy. In fact, the opposite is true: The longer the gestation, the higher the risk.

The vast majority of stillbirths are preventable.

In wealthy countries like Canada, where high-tech obstetrics are the norm, stillbirths are linked to smoking, obesity, advanced maternal age, and abnormalities in the placenta and umbilical cord.

J0nas-Simpson's research was also covered by in a story about the prevalence and impact of stillbirths among Inuit communities.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Pillai Riddell will share her research with the public as one of the featured presenters in a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Café scientifique taking place tonight from 6 to 8pm at the Gladstone Hotel in downtown Toronto. The event, "Ouch! Preventing and Managing Pain in the Real World", is hosted by the Centre of Nursing at The Hospital for Sick Children in collaboration with CIHR.

Right: Rebecca Pillai Riddell

Joining Pillai Riddell in this informal discussion between leading researchers and the public are Anna Taddio, a professor in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto and a pharmacist at the Hospital for Sick Children, and Denise Harrison, chair in Nursing Care of Children, Youth & Families at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and the University of Ottawa. The event will be moderated by Tom Blackwell, senior national reporter for The National Post.

Pillai Riddell runs 91��ɫ’s Opportunities to Understand Childhood Hurt Laboratory (OUCH Lab) and is an associate scientist in The Hospital for Sick Children’s Department of Psychiatry Research. She has two research programs on the go, both looking at pain in infancy.

Her first, Understanding Chronic Pain in Infancy, is designed to define what chronic pain is in infancy, to establish a baseline that everyone can agree on, because right now there isn’t one, and to develop a measure to assess it. Chronic pain goes beyond acute pain, which is more temporary in nature – heel pricks, regular needles or post-operative – and can have implications on a person’s life into adulthood.

In collaboration with researchers at 91��ɫ, the University of Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children as well as Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Women’s College Hospital, and armed with a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) operating grant, Pillai Riddell is looking at infants in the neonatal intensive care units of hospitals. This is where many premature infants experience ongoing pain as medical procedures are performed. “With that comes an enormous amount of iatrogenically induced pain or pain that is a result of the life-saving treatments.”

The goal is to better understand chronic pain in infants by talking with parents, health professionals and national and international experts, which can then be used to develop a conceptual model of chronic pain in infants, followed by a reliable and valid assessment measure, and finally strategies for infant chronic pain management.

Café scientifiques started in the late 20th century as an informal discussion about scientific subjects. They were never intended to be lectures. The same holds true for CIHR Café scientifiques. They provide insight into health-related issues of popular interest to the general public, and in turn provoke questions and provide answers.

For that reason, the CIHR Café scientifiques are all about accessibility. They involve interaction between the public and experts in a given field at a café, a pub or a restaurant. If you want to take part in a CIHR Café scientifique, there is no need for you to have a science degree. You just need to have a deep-rooted desire to talk about a particular health subject. That way you could learn how health research may provide answers to any questions that are on your mind.

Can't be there in person? Join the group on Facebook.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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From the moment their child dies, parents are faced with the two extremes of loss and life – the suffocating loss of a child and the ongoing, daily demands from their surviving children, says Fleming, co-author of the recently published book, Parenting After the Death of a Child: A Practitioner's Guide.

"The challenge that parents face is this: In the midst of grief, how do you stop parenting the deceased child while you are simultaneously struggling to meet the parenting needs of the children who remain?"

Fleming, a psychology professor in the Faculty of Health at 91��ɫ, and co-author Jennifer Buckle [MA ’98, PhD ’03], now a professor at Memorial University, did the research for the book when Buckle was a graduate student at 91��ɫ. Their research is based on in-depth interviews with parents who had lost a child and had one or more surviving children.

The about the study is available in the Research News section.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post 91��ɫ study of parents and loss receives international attention appeared first on Research & Innovation.

From the moment their child dies, parents are faced with the two extremes of loss and life – the suffocating loss of a child, and the ongoing, daily demands from their surviving children, says Fleming, co-author of the recently published book, .

“The challenge that parents face is this: In the midst of grief, how do you stop parenting the deceased child while you are simultaneously struggling to meet the parenting needs of the children who remain?”

Fleming and co-author Jennifer Buckle (MA ‘98, PhD ’03), now a professor at Memorial University, did the research for the book when Buckle was a graduate student in the Faculty of Health at 91��ɫ. Their research is based on in-depth interviews with parents who had lost a child and had one or more surviving children.

They found bereaved parents do not “recover” from the loss. Instead, bereaved parenting is an act of regeneration – picking up the pieces in the face of the devastation, and regenerating both a sense of self and a sense of the family.

“Dads tend to be instrumental grievers. They go back to work, commit to working for the family and they tend to overcome the fear of putting their children out into an unsafe world sooner than moms do,” says Fleming. “Moms tend to be more intuitive grievers, more focused on internal feelings, and they have an almost paralyzing fear that if one child can die, another could die as well. So, often, moms are dragged back into parenting by the surviving children.”

Left: Stephen Fleming

Parenting After the Death of a Child, published by Routledge, fills a gap in the research about the impact of a child’s death, because it focuses not only on the grief experienced, but on the balancing act of grieving and parenting at the same time. A clinical psychologist, Fleming says he hopes the guide will educate counsellors about the importance of looking for psychological complications in mourning the loss of a child − for example, depression, generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Too often, parents are not assessed for these reactions, and they may be traumatized by images of their child’s death or illness and re-living it, he says.

The qualitative research and excerpts from the parents who were interviewed are also intended to help bereaved parents deal with the expectations they put on themselves and those imposed by the outside world. The research reassures parents, for example, that it is healthy to honour the role of the deceased child in the family by continuing to talk about the child with the surviving siblings.

It may also offer comfort by busting myths – for example, the myth that losing a child increases the likelihood that parents will divorce and that surviving family members will be split up. Roles change and parents often struggle to be consistently present physically and emotionally for their children, Fleming says, but bereaved parents rebuild their lives because their children need it.

Republished with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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It’s not that concerned educators are “out to get” best friends. But they are trying to nudge close pals apart a little bit, so that they don’t become too insular. Twosomes can turn into threesomes, and such cliques are often behind bullying. “When three or four kids get together, they can decide someone is not good enough to join their group. They can ramp each other up to do worse and worse things,” says Debra Pepler, a psychology professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, who is an expert on bullying and helps to run , a bullying information website.

. . .

Just as adult relationships aren’t always healthy or turn sour over time, kids can also get wrapped up in negative dynamics. Pepler says some close friends actually bully each other: they know each other’s secrets and can make a pal upset with a few choice words – whether about chubby ankles, a crappy slapshot or that time he wet his pants last year.

Pepler is a core member of the LaMarsh Centre for Research on Violence & Conflict Resolution.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer.

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The talk, “Positive Parenting and Positive Development in Children” will take place Wednesday, Nov. 17, from noon to 1pm at the Executive Learning Centre, X106 Seymour Schulich Building, Keele campus. A reception will follow, from 1 to 2pm at the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research. Everyone is welcome to attend, but as space is limited, it is requested that you RSVP for both the talk and the reception at owhchair@yorku.ca.

Right: Marc Bornstein

Armed with the knowledge that things do not always go well in child development, policy-makers, educators and parents share the laudable and well-intentioned goal to develop preventions, interventions and remediations in the service of children, says Bornstein. “But treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is also nurturing what is best. My talk takes a ‘positive youth development’ perspective as its starting point.”

In the first part of the talk, Bornstein will look to the literature to define prominent positive characteristics and values in children. In the second part, he will address the important goal of how children can be best helped to achieve those positive characteristics and values.

“To do this, I will show how parents, who are children’s primary advocates and their front-line defence, are the corps most available and in the greatest number to lobby and labour for children,” says Bornstein. “I discuss direct effects of parents on children as well as indirect effects. I focus on both childhood and adolescence and incorporate new work on brain development. Finally, I discuss a specificity principle that may guide future thinking and action in positive child development.”

As a researcher, Bronstein has received numerous awards for his research from such organizations as the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, the American Psychological Association, the National Institutes of Health, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the American Mensa Education & Research Foundation. In 2008, he was recognized by the Society for Research in Child Development for his efforts in the international and cross-cultural realm with its Distinguished International Contributions to Child Development Award.

Bornstein has been a faculty member at Princeton University and New 91��ɫ, and a visiting scientist, fellow and professor at more than eight universities and research institutes, including the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, University College London, Université René Descartes in Paris, the University of Tokyo and the Sorbonne.

In addition to hundreds of scientific papers, he is co-author of the widely used book series and editor of other book series, including The Crosscurrents in Contemporary Psychology, Monographs in Parenting and Handbook of Parenting. He is the founding editor of and has written several children's books.

Bornstein is also co-editor of a new book that 91��ɫ psychology Professor Maria Legerstee is publishing with University of Toronto Professor David Haley. The book, , will be released later this year by Guilford Press.

Bornstein’s research interests include the origins, status and development of psychological constructs, structures, functions and processes in the first two years of life; the effect of child characteristics and activities on parents; and the meaning of variations in parenting and in the family across different socio-demographic and cultural groups.

The talk is joint venture hosted by the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research, Echo’s Ontario Women’s Health Council Chair in Women’s Mental Health Research and The Lillian & Don Wright Foundation.

For more information, visit the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research website. For more information on the LaMarsh Speaker Series, visit the Faculty of Health website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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