By Eisa Ulen

Yesterday, as I walked with my husband and son to the park, I heard a sister from across the busy Brooklyn street. “Come on!” she yelled and flipped her ponytail. “Sh**!” Two things I knew before even looking her way: 1) This sister was a sister. 2) She was cursing her own child. I looked her way, and in one glance confirmed both assumptions were correct.

Last weekend I watched another mother release her son’s hand as they walked in front of a local supermarket. Since the child appeared to be about 4, I assumed they had some routine where he stopped at the mechanical horse to ride it before shopping. I made this assumption because, just a few feet past the horsey ride, cars were swinging into the parking lot at speeds fast enough to do a 4 year old great harm. But he didn’t stop at the 25-cent-a-ride old fashioned horse, or at the door to the supermarket. He kept running, just as another car pulled into the lot he still ran, blissfully unaware of the danger ahead, and I pulled my stroller to the side to reach for him.

“Amir!” his mother cried, freezing me with the screaming pitch of a mother in fear, and, luckily, freezing her son, who instantly stopped, swirled, his face pleading open in an O of fear. I reached for him as this mother hurried forward, and he twisted from me and ran into her arms. Instead of hugging him close, checking him, even softly scolding him for running into the street, she beat him.

As he cried, she thanked me, then shouted at him, “do you want to sit and watch while the other kids play on the playground?! Stop crying!” I didn’t hear her tell him why she was so upset, don’t know that he learned not to run into busy New York driveways as a result of that experience, and, certainly, don’t know why I thought she would hug; check; softly scold; or (and this would have been big) apologize for letting his 4-year-old hand go in the first place.

After all, why did she expect a kid under age 6 or 7 to have sense enough not to run into a driveway he can’t see? I ask this not just because it’s true, but because she kept telling him he didn’t have any sense for running into harm’s way in the first place. She beat him: “You. Don’t. Have. No. Sense.” with each fall of her hand against his 4-year-old body,

And I can’t take it. I’m a breastfeeding mother of a four-month-old now, and my hormones can’t take the sound of crying babies-any crying baby-without a deep, visceral response: the instinct to protect. In both cases, I wanted to shield these beautiful brown boys from their protectors, protect them from their mothers.

Should I have told the mother in front of the supermarket to calm down? Could I have said, in a soothing tone, “Awww, he’s ok, aren’t you, sweetie? Just scared a little, right?” as a way to diffuse her wrath? Would I intervene next time?

Dr. Joy De Gruy Leary, a professor of social work at Portland State University, renowned for her research and discourse on what she terms Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, traces the problem of physical and verbal abuse in our families to the violence of the slave system, and both explore the sociological influence on and impact of black parenting styles through the generations.

There’s a biological component as well.

When I shared my experience at the supermarket parking lot with one friend, a mother of a two-year-old boy and former schoolteacher, she told me about a mother she saw who ignored her crying son. My friend watched, she said, for several minutes, until the mother finally turned to the boy and yelled, “Why are you crying all the time?!”

Turns out, his cries suggest elevated stress levels brought on, perhaps, by a lifetime, even such a short one, of neglect. According to a June 9 article by Dr. Miriam Stoppard, author of Baby’s First Skills:

“Stress in infancy, caused by leaving a young baby to cry, is particularly painful because, if ignored, it results in high levels of stress hormones that dampen the formation of a healthy brain. A baby is born expecting to have stress managed for her-by her parents. The prefrontal cortex (the frontal lobes), the part of the brain that exerts control over emotions, is virtually non-existent at birth. Stress hormones will remain low if you or your partner or another caring adult teach your baby to trust by holding, stroking, feeding, nuzzling, reassuring, whispering and laughing. However, as her emotions are unstable, those stress hormones can shoot up if there’s no caring adult alert to her emotional needs and prepared to calm her when she’s upset.”

Simply put, cries beget more cries, increased stress, and unstable babies. What happens to these babies, their families, and our community when they grow up, silence the tears, become parents, and hear their own babies cry?

Dr. Lane Strathearn, assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, seems to have discovered another link, one between breastfeeding and maternal neglect: To study this relationship, Strathearn and colleagues from The University of Queensland and Mater Misericordiae Children’s Hospital in Australia followed 7,223 Australian women and their children over a 15-year period. They used reports in an Australian database to identify length of breastfeeding along with other factors that might affect the likelihood that a mother would neglect or injure her child.

They found that the longer the mother breastfed her infant, the lower the risk that she would neglect the baby or child, Strathearn said.

Mothers who breastfed for less than four months were more than twice as likely to neglect their children than were those who breastfed four months or more. Those who did not breastfeed were 3.8 times more likely to neglect than women who breastfed at least four months.

‘We have turned this study inside out to adjust for possible confounding factors (factors that may contradict or confuse results) including socioeconomic status, maternal attitudes toward caregiving, anxiety, substance abuse and depression,’ said Strathearn. ‘The relationship between breastfeeding and maternal neglect still comes out very strongly.’”

Strathearn points to economic and social factors that prevent mothers from successfully breastfeeding their babies. In this country, black mothers are the least likely of all racial groups to nurse. This is a critical issue not only for child-rearing and the issue of neglect, but also to promote the physical well-being of mother and child. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends mothers nurse their babies for at least 6 months and, optimally, for a full year to promote infant and maternal health. Strathearn says that limited maternity leave inhibits women’s ability to exclusively breastfeed.

We know that, even for black mothers who don’t work, too many truths negatively impact breastfeeding and parenting styles: the truth that black mothers are disproportionately targeted by baby formula companies, the fact that black women are least likely to be diagnosed and treated for depression during and after pregnancy, the truth that black women earn less are, too often, blamed more.

We know that black women love their babies, even the ones they beat and curse. Evidence suggests that the inherited parenting styles that pass through the generations from slavery short-circuit our babies-and our communities. Still, I’m tired of hearing my sisters abuse their babies in the street. I want to hear more love flow from mother to child as I pass by black mammas and their beautiful babies, babies so much like my own.

Eisa Ulen Richardson, a writer working and living in Brooklyn, N.Y., is the author of Crystelle Mourning

www.EisaUlen.com