Occasionally, Teresa Trojanowski hopes her son TJ played hockey or football, got his driving license or a first date. But those hopes are not to be. When he was only 29 days old, TJ was profoundly injured, with 85 per cent of his brain damaged. Eleven years later, he is wheelchair-bound, unable to see more than light and shadow, unable to speak or move his body at will. His meals are delivered by gastric tube.

The reason: he was severely shaken as an infant by his father, who was doing most of the child care while his mother was unwell. “A lot of people ask if he was born that way or was he in a car accident,” Trojanowski says. “Nobody wants to think somebody who loved him did this.”

Although most parents have heard that shaking a baby is dangerous, few might realise the lifelong devastation that can result from only a few seconds of shaking. “It takes less than three seconds of shaking to kill or disable a child for life,” says Karen Foley-Schain, executive director of the Connecticut Children’s Trust Fund. “New studies show that it’s not enough to tell the mothers. You have to tell the fathers and caregivers, too.” Dr Nina Livingston, director for Hartford Regional Child Abuse Services, says shaken-baby syndrome is becoming an area of great interest because this type of abuse “is among the most devastating” and “we actually have some prevention tools.”

Livingston says that shaking or impacting a baby’s head “is really a complex event bio-mechanically.”

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