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Interventions

Empowerment

Implications

Not Just Skin

NotJustSkin
3918 Madison St.
Hyattsville, MD 20781
(301) 779-8388

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NotJustSkin.org needs your help!

Our work is done almost entirely by volunteers and sustained by the donations of caring individuals. We need help to sponsor some of the critical work we have planned for coming months.

You can also write or call Ryan McAllister (301-779-8388) to lend assistance with any particular project or to find out how to help.

Appreciatively,

Ryan McAllister, Ph.D.
Executive Director, NotJustSkin.org
Putting Children First

Background and Motivation

While the U.S. currently spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, we have higher infant and maternal mortality rates than all other industrialized nations and Cuba. And, while we spend more per capita on psychiatry and psychiatric medication than any other country, we have higher rates of suicide, depression, and domestic violence than any other industrialized nation. Taken separately or together, these facts represent a public health crisis.

Today, prospective parents encounter confusing, contradictory, and incorrect information about birth and parenting choices in consumer magazines, by word of mouth, and even from mis-informed medical professionals. Children and parents also experience negative social pressures, socially accepted oppressive practices, and neglectful or abusive treatment from medical professionals.

Current efforts to address these problems through increasing use of drugs and medical interventions on children and birthing women, increasing use of reward/penalty systems in parenting and education, and increasing levels of incarceration are failing to resolve these problems because they do not address its origin. Institutionalized and culturally accepted practices around birth, childhood, and parenting are harmfully out of sync with human needs. We continue to learn about those needs by personal experience and extensive research into scientific and clinical information.There is clear need for accurate information, beneficial peer support, and social change to address this public health crisis. What could be more worth your support?

NotJustSkin's Mission

Promote a warmer start to life, greater physical and emotional health of children and parents, and a less violent society by:

• Providing information and support for parents
• Encouraging choices that promote the physical, emotional, and psychosocial health of children
• Clarifying the options of pregnant, birthing, and post-partum women and families to promote the welfare of children and parents
• Eliminating oppressions

Work to Date

We have given talks, facilitated discussions, lead support groups, exhibited, and coordinated workshops to provide information and support around these problems and solutions, at a variety of events/organizations, including:

• The Holistic Moms Network
• Gender Public Advocacy Coalition
• The East Coast Green Festival
• The National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers
• Frederick Birthing Circle
• University of Maryland School of Nursing

• Babies Are Us
• DONA (Doula Organization of North America)
• True Equality Congress
• National Conference on Gender (www.gpac.org)
• American Medical Student Association national conference
• Birth, the Play (at the New Play House in Frederick, MD)

We have maintained an extensive and growing web-based, research-driven resource for parents and prospective parents, providing clear and reference information about public health parenting issues including:

• Approaching Doctor's Appointments
• Birthing Options
• Breastfeeding
• Cesarean Sections
• Circumcision
• Doulas supporting birth
• Epidurals
• Episiotomy
• Female Genital Cutting
• Genital Assignment Surgery
• Midwifery

We are now researching additional issues we have identified as crucial to solving the violence crisis:

• Attentive co-sleeping
• Benefits of baby wearing
• Conscious parenting
• Early roots of sexism
• Implications for long-term psychological problems and domestic violence
• Use of behavioral modification drugs on children
• Vaccinations

We provide a growing number of our information resources in Spanish translation in order to address the concern that persons who speak English as a second language are often put at a severe disadvantage in our medical system. We have begun to assemble literature in additional languages.

In addition, we have provided in-person, by-telephone, and by-email support for dozens of parents and concerned individuals in the past year.

Current Project

NotJustSkin.org is currently developing a Resource Guide for Prospective Parents, to be distributed for free to all prospective parents in Maryland. In a 16 page, full-color format, this Guide will provide clear information that supports positive parenting and healthy birth choices on the part of parents. It will include human interest articles on birth and parenting issues, include factual and referenced information, list additional resources for information and support that are available to parents and respond to all of the areas we have so far identified as critical to the improved wellbeing of children and parents. In addition to our previous years' expenses, we expect the resource guide will cost at least $10,000 to assemble, design, publish, and mail for free to expecting parents in the metro area.

In addition, we continue to research and assemble materials about additional critical issues and solutions in the effort to decrease the rates of maternal mortality, infant mortality, alienated children and parents, domestic violence, depression, suicide, and psychiatric drug use.

NotJustSkin is an educational charity that is not associated with the government or any private corporation. Our mission is to support the physical health, emotional wellness, and quality of relationships of children, parents, and others.

People are not just skin.

This page was last modified on 1/12/2008.

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