Sympathy for troubled mom shouldn't be too much to ask for

The sad tale of Ashley Couch is last week's news, except in the life of Couch, where the ramifications likely will play out for years.

Couch is the 21-year-old Twin Cities mother who allegedly hurled her 18-day-old daughter into a snowbank March 5. The temperature was 16 degrees and the infant, quickly separated from her blanket, was dressed in a T-shirt. Couch landed in jail, where she remains, charged with child endangerment and child neglect.

I hate stories like this, for all the obvious reasons but mostly for others.

Let me begin with a prediction. There is no danger here of copy-cat parents hurling babies into snowbanks, any more than we should lose sleep about cute little puppies being mailed perilously en masse across the country in hole-less boxes.

The story of Ashley Couch simply allows us to be shocked, smug, superior. But sympathetic? Way tougher.

Like Hennepin County Attorney, and fellow parent, Mike Freeman, I can't imagine a mother or father "cavalierly" throwing a child into a snowbank. But who said anything about this being a cavalier act? I'm haunted by other questions, such as how did a young parent in our community become so desperate? How did she plunge this deeply through the cracks? And what are we going to do now to make sure that she, her precious baby now safely in foster care, and the baby's 19-year-old father get their best shot at a secure and healthy future that so many of us take for granted?

"It's very easy, and natural, to hear about a case like this and instantly judge and be horrified," said Krista Post, a licensed psychologist and co-director of Pregnancy & Postpartum Support Minnesota (www.pregnancypostpartumsupportmn.com). "It's much harder to take a closer look, to understand what this mother and young family might have been up against."

Post and I can only speculate about what those factors might be, but it's no stretch to guess that mental health issues, possibly post-partum depression, played a role. While post-partum depression affects about 20 percent of all new mothers, the rate shoots up to 45 percent among mothers who are African-American, Post said, and goes even higher for mothers living in poverty. That number is growing.

A report released Wednesday by Children's Defense Fund-Minnesota found that our state had the nation's fifth-lowest poverty rate for white children in 2009, and the fifth-highest for African-American children. This comes as budgets for social services, including mental-health resources and young-parent programs, are being cut to the bone or eliminated.

"The thing is," Post said, "when you hear about something like this, you've got to know that there are countless other young families also struggling and at wit's end. My practice is bursting women and couples from all over the Twin Cities who are really at risk. Some are having trouble bonding with their babies but they can't talk about it."

Post is hopeful that new programs will help new parents everywhere. They include PPSM's mental health "WarmLine" for parents, to be launched this spring, and volunteer training to start new-parents and postpartum depression groups throughout the Twin Cities.

Post wonders how the outcome of that sad Saturday morning would have been different had Couch been offered the services of an in-home nurse or doula. Still, she's realistic about the challenges.

"When you're struggling and poor," she said, "you're the least likely to seek help."

Anna Maravelas, an expert in workplace dynamics, sees in Couch's story a human tendency to "blame the person," rather than look for deeper reasons for troubling actions. It's a handy way, she said, to disassociate ourselves from the behavior.

I'll bet that Couch has long been familiar with disassociation. As of Wednesday, she remained in the Hennepin County jail, unable to round up $600 for a bail bond.

"Anger and self-righteous indignation, that's easy," said Maravelas, owner of the Thera Rising Institute (www.therarising.com). "Altruism, connection, those take skill and courage to build. We can still be hard on the problem -- she can't do that to her baby -- but soft on the person, to allow her to grow."

Gail Rosenblum • 612-673-7350 • gail.rosenblum@startribune.com