Amer. J . Orthopsychiat. 58(2). April 1988

1988-89

Bernice Weissbourd, M.A. President

American Orthopsychiatric Association

n electing Bernice Weissbourd as President, are based on the expressed needs of participat- I the American Orthopsychiatric Association ing families and utilize ideas from the modem has been true to its pioneering interdisciplinary self-help movement and from a variety of parent history of understanding people in the context of their environment, of fo- cusing on families as well as individuals, and of be- ing a leader among mental health organizations in rec- ognizing the need for ac- tion in the arena of public policy. These are the as- pects of the Association that initially attracted Ber- nice to ortho, and they cor- respond precisely to the ar- eas of her own outstanding contributions.

From her professional beginnings as a young pi- anist turned music teacher, B e r n i c e W e i s s b o u r d emerged as a teacher of disturbed children. Af- ter working in Project Head Start, she moved into positions as supervisor and education con- sultant for day care programs, became active in professional organizations nationally and lo- cally, and has served on innumerable agency boards.

Bernice’s varied professional interests came together in 1976 in the opening of the first Fam- ily Focus center, a carefully designed, innova- tive resource for families with children from new- borns through three-year-olds. While it has many of the supportive features and goals of early com- munity centers such as Hull House, Family Fo- cus was first to integrate settlement house con- cepts with the growing knowledge of infant and child development, families as systems, and the ecology of communities. The comprehensive ser- vices provided through a Family Focus center

education strategies. From her perspective as a child development theoretician, Bernice emphasizes that “the time had come” for this new venture. With tre- mendous help and support from her husband, Barney; from Irving B. Harris, president of the Pittway Corporation; and from nu- merous colleagues and community people, Ber- nice provided the commit- ment and energy that brought Family Focus into being.

Now, twelve years later, Family Focus has become the model for hundreds of

family resource programs throughout the coun- try; there is a national network of 3000 family resource programs (the Family Resource Coali- tion) which Bernice founded, and there are seven Family Focus centers in the Chicago area: two serving teens and teen parents, two serving His- panic families, and three serving diverse middle- class families. Bernice remains the president and driving force of Family Focus and of the Family Resource Coalition. “Nothing,” she says, “has surprised me in my life as much as the way in which Family Focus zoomed.” While she does not readily spell out her own orchestrating and fine tuning of these ventures, which has been vital to their success, she does admit to being proud of the recent publication, America’s Fam- ily Support Programs (Yale University Press, 1987), a comprehensive historical and descrip- tive work, of which she is a co-editor.

164 0 1988 American Orthopsychiatric Association, Inc.

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This new book stands on a special shelf in the Weissbourd home with books of which she has no reluctance to speak with pride-those of her daughter, Ruth Grant, on John Locke; of her daughter-in-law, Kathy Weissbourd, on the Wil- liam James family; film scripts by her oldest son, Burt; and a to-be-published work of her youngest son, Rick. Her middle son, Robert, is a lawyer who is active in the political arena and, like his parents, deeply concerned with assuring a society whose benefits reach all of its citizens.

The time and energy Bernice has devoted to Family Focus have not diminished the scope of her other activities in the years since Family Focus began. She writes a monthly column for Parents magazine as a contributing editor; serves on several national boards, including those of the National Center for Clinical Infant Pro- grams, Child Care Action Committee, and Peo- ple for the American Way: and is former vice president of the National Association for the Ed- ucation of Young Children. In Chicago, Bernice is a board member of the Erikson Institute of Loyola University, of Northwestern University Institute of Psychiatry, of Northwestern Center for Urban Planning, of Expressways Children's Museum, and of the University of Chicago Women's Board. She serves in an official advi- sory capacity for the Chicago Foundation for Women, Latino Institute, the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chi- cago, and Music of the Baroque. She is a mem- ber of the Chicago Women's Network and is a Life Trustee of the Chicago Institute of Psycho- analysis. A list of the awards Bernice has re- ceived would be equally lengthy.

ernice's concept of the role she will play as B President of Ortho is closely linked to her determination and ability to follow a theme (with variations). She will seek to integrate into the activities of our Association her understanding of the effectiveness of the new family support movement. Cognizant of Ortho's traditional championing of services that are oriented to- ward prevention, she would have us focus even more sharply on the very early years of child- hood, on "family" in the broadest sense. She would have us not only promote programmatic steps in these directions, but also act on the policy changes they imply. Bernice believes that

all families deserve support and that resource centers for families should exist in every com- munity.

Her parents, who loved music, urged Bernice to become a musician rather than a child psy- chologist, her own first choice. Her mother was a piano teacher and her father was in the music instrument business. In addition to the fact that their daughter had musical talent and had been encouraged by her teachers to make music her career, they thought that teaching music could more easily be combined with raising a family than could practice as a psychologist. Thus, af- ter attending the University of Chicago and get- ting a B.M. from the American Conservatory of Music, Bernice went on to the Julliard School of Music and received an M.A. from Columbia University. While she eventually chose another career, Bernice talks with enthusiasm of the pe- riod from 1945 to 1954 when she was busy de- veloping music programs for children at Roose- velt and DePaul Universities and directing a very successful private music school in Chicago.

Despite her parents' concerns, Bernice has proved herself quite able to combine working in the mental health field with rearing a family. When the youngest of her four children was about six years old, Bernice became a teacher of chil- dren rather than of music. Her "ear" remained perceptive of many themes in family and com- munity affairs. As consultant and education di- rector of day care centers between 1967 and 1976, she began to take a stand on local and national problems affecting child care and edu- cation. She conducted many workshops and ad- dressed groups struggling with the quality of care for young children, such as the Day Care Crisis Council and National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Working during these years with very young children and with competent staff members who cared for and educated children, Bernice early came to the realization that in the final analysis it did not matter how good she and they were as teachers-and she considered herself and her col- leagues to be very good-it was the parents who made the difference. Parents were particularly important in the earliest years, she reasoned, and what was needed to achieve maximum im- pact, especially for high-risk children, was a program to reach parents.

In 1976, Bernice gathered a planning com-

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ORTHOPSYCHIATRY

mittee with representatives from professional pro- grams such as the Erikson Institute for Ad- vanced Study in Child Development and the School of Social Service Administration of the University of Chicago. From the beginning, it was agreed that the new program should be re- sponsive to the communities that it would serve, that it should offer services to families with very young children, and that, while there would be educational components, it would not have a didactic cumculum. Early Family Focus docu- ments spoke frequently of “nurturing the nurtur- ers” and “offering support in the day-to-day life of the family which is doing well, but neverthe- less is under the stress that is concomitant with parenting young children.”

Because it brought together several ideas “whose time had come,” Family Focus had an impact nationwide almost as soon as it opened. From the outset, professionals and community people from all over the world have called, writ- ten, and visited the Family Focus centers. In response to many inquiries, Bernice co-authored a guidebook called Creating Drop-in Centers, which gives a general overview of how centers start. Several members of the Family Focus staff now join Bernice in making hundreds of presen- tations each year to groups interested in under- standing or replicating the models developed in Chicago.

Families who attended the first Family Focus centers talked of it as a life-saver. Chicago pro- fessionals in contact with the center communi- ties would agree that there are many essentially well-functioning families for whom the transi- tion to parenthood would have been a significant risk without the support of Family Focus. They would also point out that many less well- functioning families were helped to weather the onslaught of parenthood, using both the re- sources the center could provide and the more intensive professional services that Family Fo- cus helped them locate.

After Family Focus was well off the ground, national expansion of the ideas it brought to the field accelerated. In 1981, Bernice was instru- mental in getting a small grant from the Admin- istration for Children, Youth, and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services for the organization of a “Family Resource Forum,” the first national conference for family resource programs. One hundred participants

were expected; 300 came. From this gathering was created the Family Resource Coalition, which elected Bernice as its Board President. Today, the Coalition serves as a vital link for nearly 3,000 family resource professionals and organizations, operates an information clearing- house, publishes quarterly reports containing in- formative and theoretical papers, provides tech- nical assistance to programs around the country, and sponsors meetings and training institutes. Five years after FRC began, 1 ,000 participants from 48 states and two foreign countries at- tended the Coalition’s first convention in Chi- cago.

In many workshops, panels, and keynote speeches around the country, Bernice has reached a large and varied audience of lay and profes- sional groups interested in family resource pro- grams. She is known for her seemingly limitless energy, her pursuit of knowledge and ability to transmit it, her creative ideas and capacity to implement them. Most of all, she is known for her commitment to children and families, and for her quality of sympathetic concern, on a pro- fessional as well as a personal level.

haring the theoretical and practical aspects S of family resource programs among thou- sands of practitioners or potential practitioners has not been enough for Bernice. She has set her sights on pursuing public policies, at both the state and national levels, which provide ade- quate resource to families, whatever their needs may be. The philosophy of family support re- quires an understanding of the public and pri- vate context in which the family functions, and it is clear that even the most comprehensive fam- ily resource programs cannot provide adequate assistance for all families without available, ac- cessible public resources to fill in the gaps. Ad- equate housing, child care, education, medical care, job security, and other family support ser- vices are essential to a family’s ability to func- tion well for its children. Bernice believes that we cannot ignore these needs or the system which fails to provide them if we are to serve families effectively.

In her efforts to make an impact on policy decisions, Bernice has served on virtually every Illinois board or task force involved with service to families. Those who have served with her on national boards are familiar with her energetic

BERNICE WEISSBOURD 167

commitment to change in the public arena. She has testified before numerous committees, in- cluding the House Select Committee on Chil- dren, Youth and Families in Washington, D.C. in September 1984, on ways to improve child care services for infants and toddlers. In addi- tion, Bernice serves as Public Policy Chairman for the National Center for Clinical Infant Pro- grams. Ortho can look forward to leadership with a strong commitment to public policy analysis and appropriate activism by professionals in the field.

In everything she produces, Bernice puts par- ents in the forefront. However, as a grand- mother of seven she is also very aware of that

stage of life and delights in the unexpected the- ories held by children which defy “education.” Her four-year-old granddaughter was explaining to her the upcoming birth of the next baby in the family: “The baby grows in the mother’s stom- ach, it comes out though the vagina, and then the stork comes to the hospital and brings the baby home.” That child must have inherited Bernice’s integrative capacity, a capacity which will greatly benefit Ortho during the term of her leadership.

Elizabeth Jacob, MA Three Generation Project

Jewish Family and Community Service Chicago