April 2026 FCC Community Exchange

Thank you to the 180+ members who joined us for this month’s FCC Community Exchange session! We’re incredibly grateful to Alexa Craig, MD, Betsy Pilon, and Liz Sewell, MD, MPH who shared practical, evidence-based ways to safely implement parental holding during therapeutic hypothermia.

Highlights:

• Barriers to holding during cooling speak to the breadth by which we have accepted the suppression of the voice of the family and baby. Somewhere along the way, ‘safety’ became synonymous with control, separation, and standardization rather than relationship, co-regulation, and shared knowing. And yet, the science and folks’ lived experiences tell us that parents are care. Re-centering parental presence isn’t a risk but a return to what is biologically and humanly essential.

• Telling a parent their arms are an unsafe place for their NICU baby is a catastrophic communication error that can have profound, long-lasting consequences including deepened trauma & PTSD, feelings of alienation & guilt, and impaired bonding with their infant.