Previous to arriving in St. Louis, Missouri and founding MMWI, Donald Jeffries was, from July 1997 until June 1998 the Shaken Baby Syndrome Training Coordinator for the State of New Mexico. He worked at the time for the New Mexico Advocates for Children and Families, and the contract was with the New Mexico Department of Children and Family Services.

In a great many ways, there were two significant precursors to Donald’s motivation to found the Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute in 2003. The first was his involvement with the New Mexico men’s wellness movement, beginning in 1989, and the second was the focus that he formulated for the Shaken Baby Syndrome [SBS] contract. It became obvious to him (literally, in a moment of inspiration early in July 1997, just as he as taking over as the sole contractor, having worked on it as a junior partner the previous year), that SBS was a powerful vehicle for talking about men’s emotional wellness.

Several statistics motivated this realization: (1) 70% of the perpetrators of shaken baby syndrome were the biological fathers of the children [with another 20% being step-fathers or boyfriends of the child’s mother], and (2) 60% of the victims were male children. Mr. Jeffries thought “why would the children be primarily injured by their own fathers, and why, to a significant degree, are male children injured in such violent shaking, much more so than female children?” Clearly, he theorized, there was some aspect to the way in which males are socialized in American society that would lead them to behave in such a violent manner toward the children for whom they were the primary ‘caregivers’.

From this realization, Donald drafted a comprehensive presentation [which went from the 45-minute SBS-only talk that the previous contractor had engaged in to a 2-hour presentation] which focused on how males are socialized in our culture and why that socialization ‘set the stage’ for such violent behavior. Clearly, not all males who grow up receiving traditional male socialization and who later have children injure their babies in such a violent manner, but the ones who do become perpetrators react to their male socialization in a manner which, Donald proposed, is not really all the ‘aberrant’; in fact, training males to be violent, by suppressing and sublimating their healthy expression of pain and angst - and leaving them only with anger as an ‘acceptable’ emotion to outwardly express - is more the ‘norm’ in our patriarchal culture.

With these realizations as a foundation, Mr. Jeffries began giving SBS presentations throughout the state of New Mexico (approximately 60 during the life of the contract), as well as radio interviews and an interview on the City of Albuquerque cable channel. At the conclusion of the contract, in 1998, a video was made of his presentation, funded by Call To Action [an SBS advocacy group]; copies of the video were then distributed to all 32 country health departments in New Mexico. Just as he was preparing to leave New Mexico at finish his social work graduate work at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, the National Conference on Child Abuse asked him to give his innovative presentation to that organization. Unfortunately, in order to attend the conference, he would have had to postpone his social work studies (as the conference occurred at the start of the academic year). Reluctantly, Donald had little choice and therefore turned down the offer.