Dr. Ronald Barr

Helping babies thrive: Ronald Barr helps parents give newborns a good start in life

Newborns are usually welcomed home with joy, yet some parents may be unprepared for the 24/7 care. As a pediatrics professor at the University of British Columbia and Canada Research Chair in Community Child Health Research, Ronald Barr has devoted his career to helping newborns thrive by providing parents with practical childrearing tools.

“Raising a newborn is filled with challenges,” he says. “How caregivers interact with babies has an enormous impact, since both behavioral and biological factors contribute to infant development, which in turn affects how babies orient themselves in the world.”

Understanding baby physiology and behaviour are essential in fostering infant development, according to Dr. Barr, whose pedigree in childrearing research is extensive. He is Director of both the Centre for Community Child Health Research, based at Vancouver’s Child and Family Research Institute, and the Experience-based Brain & Biological Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Dr. Barr’s studies have had a positive impact on infant well-being. He has shown that pain from immunizations can be reduced by as much as 50 percent if two-and-four-month-old infants were breastfed during the process.

Dr. Barr has also advocated that crying and, in particular, the increased crying in the first three to five months of life often called “colic,” is a manifestation of normal infant development. His findings have been incorporated into large-scale public education campaigns to help caregivers overcome this. The intervention program, called the “Period of PURPLE Crying,” has earned international recognition as a potential strategy for helping prevent shaken baby syndrome. The program describes the stages of healthy crying and warns caregivers about the hazards of shaking babies, while spelling out alternatives for respite such as allowing caregivers to take 10 to15 minute breaks from their infant if they are too frustrated by the crying.

In collaboration with Dr. Barr and the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome in Utah, healthcare researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University recently adopted the “Period of PURPLE Crying”. This program will be distributed to the parents of 125,000 infants a year for the next five years. In Canada, the program has been adopted by the Ministry of Children and Family Development in British Columbia, and is being implemented and evaluated province-wide.

“Early infancy is critical in providing a good start in life and negative experiences, such as shaken baby syndrome, can seriously derail normal development,” says Dr. Barr. “Babies need positive care giving experiences that sustain and support development.”

Dr. Barr’s research is now taking a high-tech turn as he develops a baby diary similar to a Palm Pilot. “This device can be used to document typical infant behaviour and care giving in the home, a more ‘ecologically normal’ context than the laboratory studies,” he says. “In particular, we can use it to assess the effects of sleep and napping on normal infant memory, and this complements our current studies on the effects of feeding on infant memory for spoken words.”

Dr. Barr’s research is funded by the Canada Research Chair in Community Child Health Research, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USA), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP).

For further information, please contact Dr. Ronald Barr using the Email contact form or by phone at 604 875-3568