Michael Liggins and his partner, Keyonna, are the Chicago couple who, in large part, inspired Dr. Dana Suskind to write the book, “Parent Nation.”
Michael and Keyonna’s son, Mikeyon, missed five years of his father’s loving presence — his hugs, his laughter, his lessons — because Michael spent that time wrongly imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Five years he sat waiting to be tried—not appealing or serving a sentence. Waiting for his case to be heard.
Dana met Michael and Keyonna through a TMW Center program that helps parents build rich language environments for their children. Keyonna embraced the program wholeheartedly, following and executing every one of the evidence-based strategies. But evidence-based strategies aren’t enough to overcome the larger obstacles that society throws in the path of far too many families—work constraints, economic stresses, housing insecurity, structural racism. Day-to-day realities matter as much as any strategy for healthy brain development: They either allow for the brain-building power of talk to occur, or, if they limit parents’ opportunities for engaging, they stifle it like weeds choking the growth of a garden.
The rain doesn’t last forever.’
It’s hard to imagine a starker example than Michael and Keyonna’s. So Dana set out to tell their story—and the story of so many other parents, across demographics and zip codes and income brackets and political lines, who are struggling to raise their children in a nation whose policies and norms are in diametric opposition to what families need.
“Perhaps Michael and Keyonna’s story feels extreme, a dramatic and horrifying turn of events, but not one that is likely to happen to many parents,” Dana writes in Parent Nation. “But our nation has a history of separating children from their parents, a practice that demonstrates callous disregard for the intense bonds between parent and child, for the sustaining power of loving caregiving, and for parents’ role as brain architects. I see their story as a stark reminder of the barriers—of all sizes— that are thrown up in front of loving parents.”
Michael, Keyonna and Mikeyon are reunited now. “The rain doesn’t last forever,” Keyonna told Dana.
We owe it to Mikeyon, and all children, to build brighter days ahead.