About 2,000 parents throughout the State benefit from community mother programmes involving some 150 volunteers, writes SHEILA WAYMAN
IT IS early days in tantrum taming but Jamie Murphy and her partner William O’Dwyer cannot believe the difference in their son, Jack, who is going through the “terrible twos”.
“He was like an angel all day yesterday,” Murphy (22) tells Sharon Walsh, a community mother with an innovative south Tipperary parenting support programme, who is visiting their home in Clonmel.
Walsh has been helping the couple to change their approach to Jack’s tantrums – basically to ignore them and act as if nothing is happening.
It is not a tactic that Murphy is used to. For her, standard first-time mother anxiety was heightened by their son’s premature arrival at 29 weeks in Cork University Maternity Hospital.
“I never ignored him. When he was a baby, the slightest whimper I would pick him up. I won’t do the same with Lauren,” she says, nodding towards Jack’s eight-month-old sister happily playing at her feet.
As Jack started trying to exert his will, “we were responding to him, giving out”, explains O’Dwyer. Now they have to show him it is not the way to get attention.
A chance encounter in the town a couple of months ago with the parenting programme’s co-ordinator, Jill Sandvoss, prompted Murphy, who was feeling stressed at the time, to have visits from a community mother. It has been “brilliant”, she says.
“It is a great help,” agrees O’Dwyer, who runs a bouncy castle business. “All the stress is gone.”
Walsh told them about a creche in the Clonmel Resource Centre, which Jack has started attending a few mornings a week. It gives them a bit of breathing space and lets Jamie enjoy one-on-one time with Lauren.
“You don’t know what is out there,” remarks O’Dwyer, grateful for the information she has been able to put their way.
This Thursday morning, she has arrived with a laminated reward chart she made herself to encourage Jack to wear the glasses he needs to be using consistently before surgery to correct an eye condition – the only apparent legacy of his premature birth.
From talk of Jack and Lauren, the conversation drifts onto what Murphy might like to do as the children get a bit older.
“I love cooking and baking,” she says, and Walsh promises to find out more about a cookery course a woman she knows is running locally. “It is something to work towards.”
A core belief that a happy parent makes a happy child underpins the Clonmel Community Parent Support Programme. It started in 1999 with six volunteers, based on community mother schemes operating in other areas of the country (see panel), but Sandvoss soon saw the need to put it on a professional footing to ensure continuity and to gain cross-community acceptance in a provincial town of approximately 18,000 people.
It was the first programme in the State to employ community mothers, starting in 2001, and currently there are three who work 65 hours a week between them. With 85 families on the books for home visits, which are free, the programme extends its reach through parent-toddler groups that are run three times a week, with the help of two volunteers, a weekly mother and baby group, and a fortnightly support group for new breastfeeding mothers.
The multicultural nature of the community is reflected in the fact that families of more than 20 different nationalities are involved.
Operating out of a small office on the first floor of the Clonmel Community Resource Centre, which houses other services such as public health nurses, with whom they liaise, a creche and a lone parents initiative, the programme observes clear boundaries. Information and support are the community mothers’ brief; it is about creating independence, not dependence. They never give medical advice but do know where to refer people.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the River Suir this particular morning, Walsh’s colleague, Margaret Waters, has dropped in to first-time mother Mieke Mayllaert (36) in Cascade Park. Her son, James Brosnan, is all smiles for the visitor who he has got to know over the eight months since his arrival in the South Tipperary General Hospital.
The community mothers are allocated a slot in the hospital’s antenatal classes and any parent who registers an interest in the programme is followed up with a phone call after the birth. Some new parents just want the social contact which the groups offer, others value one-on-one support.
Mayllaert appreciates the opportunity the visits by Waters give her to discuss issues in confidence, with somebody who does not have the emotional tie of family or friends.
“By teasing it out, you do find the way yourself,” says Mayllaert, who is taking a year off from work as a self-employed ecologist to be home full-time with James. “There is no judgment on the path you decide to take.”
In the early days, she struggled to settle James, who she is breastfeeding, into a sleep routine. When other mothers talk about their babies sleeping through the night and yours is waking every two and a half hours, you don’t feel like admitting it, she says.
Now that James is beginning to crawl, Waters has arrived with a booklet on “babyproofing” your home. “He will still get the odd bump,” she says. “All you can do is minimise it.”
Mayllaert, whose extended family live in Navan, Co Meath, and Dublin, also takes James to the parent-toddler sessions. “Some days it is so difficult to get out but then I am so glad I have gone.”
Catherine O’Meara admits that, before the birth of her daughter eight years ago, she thought community mothers were just “for people who won’t be able to look after their children”. It was only afterwards she realised how wrong she had been.
She was grateful that, while everybody else was inquiring about the baby, there was somebody to come into her home and ask, “How are you doing?” She also has lasting friendships with some of the women she met at the baby group.
Now O’Meara is on the other side of the door, as a community mother with a level five Fetac childcare qualification. The big change she and her colleagues have seen in recent times is the number of fathers at home.
“They find it very hard to open up and trust you,” says Walsh, “but once they do, they take it on.” The number of men attending the toddler-parent groups is also slowly rising.
Sandvoss says they would like to be able to expand and employ a community father, but there is no prospect of that in the current economic climate (although the Sisters of Mercy are funding a pilot project in Carrick-on-Suir).
They all took a wage cut to help keep the programme afloat when its HSE funding was reduced to €107,000 last year and they are hoping it will not fall further in 2011. It is at times like this, when money is tight all round, that the kind of personalised and cost-effective support which community mothers provide for parents, is never more badly needed.
“If you are going through a phase with yours, you will find somebody going through the same phase with theirs”
“Free play” time for 20 toddlers all in one place might sound like bedlam but there is a surprising sense of orderliness as tots explore an array of toys arranged on mats scattered across the wooden floor of a large parish hall.
Some want their watching parent involved, others are happy to do their own thing. They may have not yet reached the stage of playing together, but the toddlers are clearly fascinated by their peers all around them.
One of several parent-toddler groups organised each week by the Clonmel Parent Support Programme, it is an opportunity for social interaction by parents as well as the children.
Two of the community mothers, identifiable by their turquoise polo shirts and name badges, facilitate the two-hour session, which includes a group sing-song and sit-down snack time for all the children while the parents have coffee.
Among the gathering on a recent Thursday morning in St Mary’s Parish Hall is Antonia Coonan who started coming from Fethard, Co Tipperary, with her daughters three weeks ago.
Katie (2) is still acclimatising herself to the crowd, her arms firmly entwined around her mother’s neck as they sit on the floor together, but her 11-month-old sister, Laura, is striking out on her own.
They “absolutely love it”, says Coonan, who works part-time as a vet and is juggling her hours to come here. “They love the social side of it and the different toys to play with.”
She herself appreciates the chance to talk to other parents. “If you are going through a phase with yours, you will find somebody going through the same phase with theirs.”
Christine Meehan is a veteran of the group, having attended for nearly a decade with each of her four children. “I am not from Clonmel originally and I did it to make friends,” she says, as her youngest child, Rachel (2), is engrossed in playing with a sturdy, circular wooden kitchen.
Although Meehan had been working in the town before she had her first child, Karen (9), “I did not have any friends who were mothers”. You can’t really approach a parent with a buggy in Dunnes or Penney’s, she remarks, but in a group like this “if your kids are playing with the same toy, you are not going to just stand there and not say anything”.
Her best friend now is a woman she met at the group whose daughter is only three weeks older than Karen.
Michael Baker is sitting on a bench against the wall and, as one of only two fathers present today, says “I feel awkward being here”. But he has come for the sake of his 16-month-old son, Freddie, who is very happily mingling.
His wife, Nessa, started bringing Freddie to the group during her maternity leave, before she returned to her job as a teacher. She has been encouraging Michael to continue the habit, as he now takes the morning “parenting shift” when she leaves the house at 8.30am, before he starts work at the local Abbott laboratories at 4.30pm.
Siida Skarzynski says it is her 16-month-old son, Kareem Abdul, who “makes sure I come here every week, he loves it”. A Turkish national, she arrived in Clonmel two years ago and has found the group very inviting. “It is easy to meet people.”
COMMUNITY MOTHERS: WHAT ARE THEY?
The State’s biggest and longest-running community mothers’ programme was set up in Dublin in the last recession, during the 1980s. It now involves about 150 volunteers providing peer support to about 2,000 parents each year, mainly in disadvantaged areas.
It is a highly structured programme, with monthly home visits focusing on healthcare, nutrition and child development. The community mothers are trained and supported by 11 family development nurses who work with the programme.
Other community mothers’ programmes have developed with the support of the HSE in areas including Limerick, Cork and Co Westmeath, as well as north and south Tipperary.
