“From Ignorance to Advocacy - I Am Going to Change My World!”

NineZero Advocate Highlight:

Barbara Fowler - “From Ignorance to Advocacy - I Am Going to Change My World!”


For most of my life I was totally ignorant of the abnormal neurological development caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) were not even a blip on my radar. My husband, Jim, and I became foster parents in September of 1995. Over the next 10 years, we fostered around 90 children. It was through these children I learned that the parenting techniques we were being taught in trainings and counseling sessions as special placement program (SPP) foster parents, not only did not improve the behaviors of some of our foster children, but actually caused them to act out more.

It was somewhere in about the 6th or 7th year of fostering, while working in my kitchen I had an experience that I can only describe as “a revelation.” My adult son was on the computer in the family room which was open to the kitchen, when I heard “Look up fetal alcohol facial features.” The words were so clear that I looked around to see who was speaking to me, but there was no one there. I had never even heard of fetal alcohol syndrome and had no idea what I was talking about when I said to my son, “When you finish what you’re doing, look up ‘fetal alcohol facial features.’”

Though I was clueless as to what this was all about, nothing could have prepared me for what I would experience next. A few minutes later, my son said, “Mom, come here. Look at this.” I walked over and looked at the computer screen. The background was shaded from a bright turquoise down to a dark navy blue. In the middle was a face that looked like a police composite image of a young boy. Strange new words and phrases like short palpebral fissures, indistinct philtrum, epicanthal folds, minor ear anomalies and micrognathia surrounded the face. Lines connected the words to specific parts of the face. But it wasn’t the words that grabbed my attention. It was the face… a face so like my young daughter that when she saw it, she jumped up and down shouting, “It’s me. It’s me.”

I asked my son if he could remove the words and lines and add my daughter’s hair style to the image. About 20 minutes later, he called me over again. There on the screen was my happy-go-lucky, never-met-a-stranger, sometimes explosive, sleep-disturbed child who often prowled the halls at night pillaging small treasures from her Fowler siblings’ rooms. It was my beautiful little curly-haired pixie-faced angel who had been driven from two different Head Start programs because she could not understand or honor personal space so was constantly in-her-sister’s-space, and because of her all-too-often inappropriate or aggressive behaviors. This was the face that sparked the fire that drove me to educate myself and my world about fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), the devastating developmental damage caused by prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE).

As I researched, studied, and learned about PAE, the pieces of the puzzling behaviors and learning disabilities of some of our foster children began to make sense. The fact that my husband and I were often called to the school to pick up one of our children because of their behavioral problems was more understandable now. And, though we are no longer fostering, I am doing everything I in my power to change the world for these children and adults who live each day with the sensitivities and disabilities caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol.
I educate and help the foster, adoptive, and biological families who are raising them. I educate my world to prevent babies from being damaged by prenatal alcohol exposure. I work to increase understanding of these innocent, and often misunderstood, individuals. I help people understand that environmental changes can make life less stressful for PAE individuals. I teach parents that if a child cannot connect cause and effect, they cannot connect contrived consequences with the behaviors that are being “consequenced.” I teach that unconditional love, gentle understanding, and a calm and caring demeanor will go a long way in developing the trusting relationship that will help them behave in the way they want them to behave.

I have gone back to school at California State University, Bakersfield and earned a BA in Psychology as well as Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies. I have completed everything but my thesis in the Master of Social Work Program and I am wrapping up an individual study in the Public Policy Administration Department, my final class in the Nonprofit Management Certificate program. I plan to complete my MSW soon.

During the last five years I have also graduated from the Network for Children’s Leadership Development Training Program and The Arc of California’s Partners in Policymaking Advocacy Training Program. With the help of Dr. John Diggs, a Developmental Pediatrician and President of the Kern County Medical Society, we brought the Director of the San Diego State University Center for Behavioral Teratology, and international researcher, Dr. Ed Riley, to Kern County to present a training for doctors and othes on FASD. The next year as co-chair of the Kern County FASD Awareness Committee, we brought Teresa Kellerman to Bakersfield to conduct another FASD seminar that included a panel discussion with Teresa and her FAS-diagnosed son John, and Eva Carner and her PAE son Ricki. This event reached more than 160 people, almost four times the number who had attended our previous year’s seminar. These trainings were accomplished with the help and cooperation of many, including as well as Kern County Public Health Department, and Kern County Medical Center, Kern County Superintendent of Schools, Kern Regional Center, Bakersfield ARC (BARC), First5 Kern, HEARTS Connection, and many others.

BARC and First5Kern also funded a billboard campaign with Arc of Riverside County NineZero Project providing expertise, advice, support, encouragement, and the artwork for the billboards as well as posters and training for committee members on NineZero’s "FASTRAC," their FASD teen education program. I offer FASD trainings to anyone who will listen and have presented for parents and public health nurses, KC Network for Children, foster family agencies’ staff and foster parents, and Community Action Partnership of Kern. Along with KC FASD Committee Co-Chair Lorena Diaz, I have gotten up before the crack of dawn to do sunrise TV interviews and conducted lunchtime presentations at various Kiwanis Clubs. We have been reaching as many people as we can with the “Nine months, Zero alcohol” message of NineZero.

As my project for a grantwriting class, I worked with Jim Stream and Mark Cloud of the Arc of Riverside County and wrote a grant that, hopefully, will fund the NineZero project. It has been an honor to get to know and work with the director and staff of this wonderful organization that has accomplished so much in educating the world about prenatal alcohol exposure and changing outcomes for those who have been affected.