AnnaMarie, Director of Safe Babies for Illuminate Colorado, reflects on infant mental health, prevention and what becomes possible when systems work together around babies and families.
I didn’t plan to spend my career on this. I was a young social worker running parent recovery groups and making a two-hour round-trip commute to my internship site when I heard about a new Safe Babies court opening in my city. It was 2017. That was my first real job out of my master’s program, and my first introduction to what it looks like when infant development, child welfare, and family recovery intersect.
I’m AnnaMarie and the Director of Safe Babies for Illuminate Colorado, and over the past eight years, I’ve gone from helping launch a single court in Pueblo County to overseeing a statewide system. It has been the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done and one of the greatest honors of my lifetime.
It’s a forever wound that continues to bleed, and just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean we should ignore it.
The wounds we can’t see
The part of this work I find myself talking about most -the thing I genuinely can’t stop thinking about — is infant mental health. I know it sounds clinical, but what it really means is this: when a baby experiences serious adversity early in life, and nobody addresses it, that wound doesn’t close on its own.
Recently, I sat with a colleague who was trying to understand, and I explained, “If a baby came to us with a broken arm, we could wrap it, and it would probably heal. But there might be permanent damage if we don’t do it well. Mental health wounds work the same way. The difference is that you can’t see them bleeding. You can’t put them on an X-ray. And you can’t expect a layperson to know how to properly care for it.”
But those wounds do show up—in data. They show up as kids who can’t read in third grade. They show up as foster youth who age out of the system without stable housing. We dismiss what we can’t see, and then we’re surprised by what comes later.
Changing the trajectory earlier
Safe Babies helps change that trajectory by intervening earlier — connecting families to mental health supports, strengthening caregiver-child relationships, and making sure babies have the stable, nurturing environments they need from the start.
When we’re not working together as systems — when medical and legal partners are speaking different languages, when families don’t know which way to turn — what we’re really doing is forcing families to follow whichever system they’re most scared of. That’s not empowerment. That doesn’t help the children.
Safe Babies works differently. It creates shared understanding across systems so families can move toward support, not fear, and so decisions are made with them, not about them.
Every small step toward prevention will impact a person. That is greater than you will ever realize.
Every small step reaches a real person
What I tell states that are just starting prevention work: be patient. The quality of what you do matters far more than the speed at which you do it. Every small step toward prevention reaches a real person. I think about one mother —not a program, not a policy — just one mother whose life changed because someone showed up consistently with the right tools and a little kindness. She’s connected to other women who are struggling. The ripple is larger than we ever get to see.
We never compromise our values and our ethics for collaborations and partnerships. Kindness will always win.
That’s the impact of this work. One family who receives support early can change outcomes not just for one child, but across relationships, communities, and generations.
This work is hard. What pulled me through was being in a room with other people who were fighting for the same thing and remembering that kindness, done consistently, will always win.
