HELLO BABY
Building an Oasis in a Play Desert
by Debbie Frisch ; Isaac Stone Simonelli
Frisch and Simonelli detail the history of an innovative childcare initiative.
In this volume, Simonelli, a journalist, and child welfare activist Frisch tell the story of how she founded HelloBaby, a free-play space for babies, toddlers and their parents and caregivers, based in the rough environs of Chicago’s South Side. At HelloBaby, children are given plenty of open-ended play and activity time, and their caregivers, in addition to being able to relax for a bit, are given first-hand demonstrations of how their children blossom when taken out of their usual “play desert” (“a community where accessible play spaces are hard to find”) and allowed to flourish. To spread the word about her prospective project and perhaps secure some official funding or sanction, Frisch originally tried to interest then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and gubernatorial candidate J. B. Pritzker, but her overtures failed to elicit any response. So, Frisch pivoted to a “bottom-up” approach, contacting local community groups and churches, and, in 2017, HelloBaby opened its doors. Frisch was responding to the self-evident fact that, “unfortunately, the social systems we’ve built around families don’t always support the natural processes designed to help babies grow up strong, happy, and loved.” She notes many reasons for this—“entrenched racism, de facto segregation, the deterioration of the nuclear family, and generational histories of trauma”—and provides readers with a series of case studies of the parents and children who’ve been helped by HelloBaby since it began.
Those case studies make up a significant portion of the book and give it a very human face. They’re well chosen by Frisch and well shaped by Simonelli into personalized parables that effectively illustrate the many kinds of help young children and their adult caretakers often need—and the kinds of help HelloBaby tries to provide. There are profiles of babies like Tucker, born in rural Illinois to heroin-addicted parents, who decided, when Tucker was an infant, that they couldn’t care for him anymore, and Louise, who was born in a run-down inner-city hospital to a mother facing criminal charges and suffering from mental health issues. Alongside these personal stories, the authors engagingly tell the story of creating HelloBaby, covering everything from personnel and philosophy to the intricacies of how the actual space would be designed. “The whole space was created with an understanding of how it would be experienced from a baby’s perspective,” they write. “Over and over again, the question was asked: What would be at eye-level for an infant or toddler?” Positive moments that can uplift an entire day were “gently kneaded into the design.” Throughout, Frisch urges her readers to adopt the HelloBaby ideology: “My call to you is to pick the thing you know how to do, that you love to do, and share it,” she writes. “Even a little good can ripple out in ways you will likely never see.”A warm and heartfelt account of establishing the treasured childcare institution HelloBaby.