The Child Abuse Prevention Council in Ogden is looking for ways to prevent violent acts of frustration by teaching young men how to nurture children.
The council is making the effort following results of a study it conducted last year that show men inflict 80 percent of shaken-baby injuries.Although their ages ranged from 14 to 46, the average age of the men was 22, said Stacey Iverson, coordinator of the council's Shaken Baby Syndrome Prevention Program.
The council's research also identified 36 Utah children during a three-year period as victims of vigorous shaking that caused serious injuries. Eighteen of those children died as a result, Iverson said.
Besides resulting in death, shaking a baby too hard can cause learning disabilities, blindness, speech disabilities, seizures and paralysis.
Four-year-old Michael Caulford suffered irreparable brain damage when he was shaken at 3 months old. His adoptive mother, Carol Caulford of Clearfield, said the boy's 19-year-old father apparently grew frustrated at the baby's crying.
Caulford and her husband, Ron, had been Michael's foster parents since he was 4 months old and adopted the boy in March. Michael has undergone four brain surgeries and 13 episodes of pneumonia.
"Michael has survived so much," Carol Caulford said.
Iverson said the biggest challenge in preventing Shaken Baby Syndrome will be in convincing teenage boys and young men that their care is important.
Robb Hall, a member of the project's new advisory committee, agrees it's a significant obstacle, especially given attitudes that "only girls are baby sitters. Boys deliver newspapers and play football."
As director of Youth Impact, an activity organization for junior and senior high students, he has noticed such reactions in relationship to his own young daughter.
"The girls run up and want to hold her. The boys stand about six feet away and say, `Neat,' " he said. "Only one or two of the boys have dared to hold the baby, and then have to be shown how."