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04-03-2007
Testimony on House Bill 119 - Janet Sax
Testimony on House Bill 119
Before the House Human Services Subcommittee
4/3/07
Presented by Janet B. Sax, M.D., F.A.A.P
Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics
CWRU School of Medicine, Retired
Mr. Chairman and members of the House Human Services Subcommittee, my name is Dr. Janet Sax and I am retired Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. I am the mother of 3 sons and 9 grandchildren. I never said to my 3 sons as they were growing up, "Have you done your homework?" They loved to learn. Help Me Grow shows expectant parents how to rear the young infant so he/she is allowed to reach out and be curious. It's not the school you send your child to, but the early months and years at home that instills curiosity and security, before the child ever gets to school, 5 years later.
Help Me Grow is a program which is in urgent need of funding so that it can continue to prepare pregnant teenagers to rear children who will go to college and not to jail. Help Me Grow prevents the social ills of drugs, gangs, underachieving, and pregnant teenagers.
The arms that hold the newborn and very young infant give that baby a message: this is a beautiful world or this is a miserable world. Help Me Grow enlightens the pregnant teenager to recognize her own social situation, her educational frustrations, her career frustrations, and what to do about these frustrations, so that she can give love to the infant.
By one year of age, the baby's brain is 50% of adult size. Those early months of parenting determine a baby's future. Help Me Grow is comprehensive in parenting -education early in pregnancy, followed by consistent Help Me Grow personnel during and after delivery, and ongoing home visits during the first 3 years of life, including the teenager's significant others in the parenting-education. Rapists, murderers, Pediophiles are not born; they are victims of abuse early in infancy when those horrible experiences are fixed in the young rapidly growing brain".
My experience with families over the past 50 years makes me appreciate a program like Help Me Grow, for Help Me Grow makes a powerful difference in the outcome of parents who otherwise would struggle to understand a young infant's emotional growth and development. Our hope is that all doctors in the Ohio area will take advantage of directing their pregnant patients, who need help, to Help Me Grow, so that our future adults in the years to come will be contributing citizens. I trust that you will answer to the gravity of unfulfilled Ohio citizens, and fund this program generously.
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