Shelley Cox and Randi Goodman, are currently working on a joint project that evolved from their Master’s work.
The Santa Monica Prenatal Wellness Center celebrated its Grand Opening this September.

What is the Santa Monica Prenatal Wellness Center?

Randi and Shelley:  The Prenatal Wellness Center is a center that supports prenatal attachment before and during pregnancy. The ultimate purpose is prevention and intervention for families who are planning or have a baby. The center will offer counseling, education, wellness classes and workshops.

What is the Santa Monica Prenatal Wellness Center Mission Statement?

Randi and Shelley:
To provide prenatal education, support and counseling in an effort to educate women, men and professionals on the journey to building a community of informed individuals.
   
To promote awareness of development and attachment from conception through early childhood.

To promote innovative practices base on research in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology and health.
   
A place where families can come together to celebrate the joy pregnancy and experience a hands on exhibit that helps create a long life of bonding.
   
To develop a program to support and educate families considering conception, during pregnancy, and beyond.

What was your joint inspiration for the Wellness Center?

Randi and Shelley: After our first year at SBGI we both just realized, WOW- learning about fetal and early brain development really converted us, especially as mothers, into the belief of looking at the affects of mothers behavior, stress level, and overall wellbeing has on the brain development of their infant child beginning as a fetus and it was huge for us.

Also we have a lot in common, we are in the same developmental stage as mothers with our children, we’ve had similar experiences within the pre- & perinatal psychology program at SBGI as a result of our interests in early childhood development and we have both been involved with organizations that supported families and that have provided resources for families and we both really saw the value in that. Soon we realized that there was something we could do together and that this was the right time and the right place to begin a project like the Wellness Center.  As a part of the SBGI community we felt we had the support for a great start because there are so many women here at SBGI who are pregnant or who have dealt with difficult pregnancies and know what it’s like to raise a family, and who could have benefited from a place like the Prenatal Wellness Center.

Shelley, what about your individual, personal life story connected you to this project and inspired you?

Shelley:  I have three children, that are adults now, my youngest is eighteen and my oldest is twenty-four years old and very disabled and she has been my inspiration for much of what I have accomplished in the field of Early Intervention for Kids with Disabilities for the past twenty-four years.  I’ve also been involved with the state of California in developing programs for the Infant Development Association for fifteen years that is an advocacy organization that ensures funding for kids.

Additionally, I began my own program in 1998 that started out as an early intervention program but has expanded into social skills, counseling, behavior intervention, and includes inter- and after-school programs for children with special needs to promote inclusion in the community.  And though the intervention component is primarily for children with special needs, the program is also for children with new siblings, children who are developing as role models for their siblings, or kids that simply need a smaller environment. Essentially what we are doing is building a community of support that offers sensory integration, and we have occupational and speech therapists as well as counselors onsite that assist the children with a variety of difficult activities from getting a haircut, to going to the store or being with friends.  Also many families come to the program because we offer a great place to be with serene classrooms for groups from birth to three, three to six, six, to eleven, and eleven to sixteen.

Also, SBGI President and Founder, Dr. Marti Glenn, and I presented at the Infant Development Association Conference this year and our hopes are to unite the infant mental health world with pre- & perinatal world, and the intervention world.  They are three different schools of thought and we are inspired by building relationships between the three fields and hope to bridge some gaps between conception, birth, infancy and beyond.

Alice: And did you also recently win a prestigious award for your contribution to child development?

Shelley:  Yes.  In 2007 I won the Distinguished Service Award from the Infant Development Association, which is really a life time achievement award, but I’m not dead yet!

Randi, what about your individual, personal life story connected you to this project and inspired you?

Randi: One of my initial inspirations for the Wellness Center was a Parent Resource Center in Long Island where I used to teach.  The Parent Resource Center was a place where parents and families could go and meet other parents and families and share their experiences and take classes and receive counseling.  As a teacher there I taught everything from cooking, to tutoring your child in science, basically anything they wanted me to teach, I taught. In addition to being a resource center it became a community hub where families would have birthday parties and find babysitters in addition to any other kind of familial resource, I mean they actually had a huge book just full of resources- I loved it!

In addition to teaching at the Parent Resource Center I also specialized in Museum Education and designed exhibits for children in early childhood. Naturally I was interested in the thought of museums and parenting and so I developed a parenting center within the Long Island Children’s Museum in Garden City Long Island.  This allowed parents to play with their children in an interactive space that encouraged learning and offered resources such as books and specialized exhibits that aided in child development.  Parents could also schedule ten to fifteen minute consultations with me and other counselors to discuss pregnancy and early childhood development at the parenting center within the Children’s Museum. Soon I became intrigued by Prenatal Stimulation and after I moved to California from New York four years ago with my husband and my two daughters, my therapist referred me to Santa Barbara Graduate Institute where I met Shelley, who coincidently lived just four miles away from me in Malibu. 

How did this project materialize?

Shelley:  The Santa Monica Prenatal Wellness Center came about in the beginning of our second year at SBGI.  At SBGI the teachers really offered us an opportunity to expand upon the question, “what is PPN?”  And SBGI faculty member and PPN Chair Dr. BJ Lyman was instrumental in helping me formulate how I thought about minimizing the affects of disability.  Knowing that I wanted to do something preventive for children prior to birth one day while in conversation with Randi we just said, “Oh my god, this is it- this is what we can do!”

Randi: We spent the whole next year developing our vision and before we even started writing anything we made this 3-D model of the center that included a place we call the “Womb Room” as well as a family room and every other detail, even our offices.  Somehow I just remember days when we would be sitting in class, and I would be passing notes and we would go back and forth, “well what about this, and that, or…” and we would draw pictures and write down words, any and every kind of brain storming, we were so excited.

Shelley and Randi:  Next there was the actual development process and we started by taking a seven page outline to Dr. BJ Lyman, which was also going to be the outline for our Master’s Project, and her response was that this wasn’t a Master’s Project, “this is a LIFE PROJECT!”  Her suggestion to us was that we had to narrow it down and this was the hardest think in the world to do.  The reality was we needed to do the research first so we began working on our individual research.

Shelley:  I started to research the counseling perspective while Randi focused on prenatal stimulation and how parents can bond earlier with their unborn children with an emphasis on environmental influences of the senses.  As our research developed we came together to share our results and discovered that both sides complimented each other. The next step was to fine-tune the research component and as the second part of our Master’s Project we honed in on the specifics of the future Wellness Center together.  This is when we started to consider demographics and we looked specifically at Santa Monica and the kinds of programs already in existence for prenatal wellness and what we found was almost everything had to do with nutrition and health but nothing regarding psychology or mental health specifically.

Randi:  This is absolutely true, there is nothing about the unborn child and how it’s doing and the connection it’s making with the mother and the family.  Anything dealing with psychology begins post-partum, after birth.  I also really wanted to address the mental health of mothers and wanted some way for mothers to begin thinking of baby and me much earlier than at 12 months or 18 months as a function of preventing postpartum depression.  This was one of the central foundations of the Wellness Center; a place where mothers could go and meet other mothers in their neighborhood, to network and discuss their issues opening and without feeling isolated when the baby was born.

What advice or encouragement would you give to other Prenatal and Perinatal Psychologists and students who are interested in developing similar projects, programs and centers?

Shelley and Randi:  Well the opening of the Santa Monica Prenatal Wellness Center is just the beginning and we hope to really inspire others to contribute to their respective communities by opening similar centers and we are very open to duplicating our model around the country.  We are also interested in doing outreach programs, with students at SBGI to expand the cause and specifically to look at teenage pregnancy and society and how we can all best serve the prenatal world.  We hope that other PPN students from SBGI will come and do some counseling and so we will be offering counseling workshops and offer a supervised opportunity for training and internships.  We also want to establish a referral community between centers like ours and other professional groups such as pediatricians because one of the best things we can do is to continue providing resources including our library, media center, and interactive spaces like the “womb room” in addition to support and counseling for families beginning at the prenatal stage.

The Santa Monica Prenatal Wellness Center is located at
1814 14th Street in Santa Monica, California

Services are currently free and they are open Monday afternoon - Friday afternoon.

Contact the Wellness Center at (310) 399-5784 for counseling appointments, to check out resources, or to inquire about workshops and training opportunities.