Intervention with mothers considered at risk has proved effective. In Milwaukee, training newborn babies of mildly retarded mothers increased the children’s IQs from an average of 80 to 100 within three years.6 In North Carolina, the Abecedarian Project, providing educational day care beginning at ages six to twelve weeks, raised IQs by the time children from impoverished households were four and a half years old. All but one in a group of forty-one scored higher than the median of the general population, and eight to twenty points higher than a control group of forty-five children who were not in the program.7 A larger contingent of in youngsters, followed for twenty-one years, had a lower dropout and failure rate in school and were less likely to have children out of wedlock. The percentage attending four-year colleges was double that of the control group.8
Among the best practices that Lisbeth B. Schorr describes in her 1988 book, Within Our Reach, was a center at Yale where “pediatricians, nurses, developmental specialists, early childhood educators, and social workers met with parents and children to provide health care and periodic developmental appraisals for the children and guidance, counseling, and other supports for the parents. Families could also bring their children for day care and toddler school.” The staff did home visits as well. Ten years after the program ended, “almost all of the intervention families were off welfare and self-supporting,” she reports, “while only half of the control families were.” Mothers who had received the services ended up with more years of education, fewer babies, and children who did far better in school.9
Today, a privately run program called Parents As Teachers conducts monthly home visits in many parts of the country to instruct parents on playing, talking, and other interactions appropriate to their child’s stage of brain development. Children from birth to three who participate show better school readiness in kindergarten, according to studies cited by the project.10 One difficulty is gaining access to the homes of families that are afraid of being accused of abuse, so the visits may not be reaching the neediest parents.
The coin of good parenting has two sides: first, the specific techniques that can be learned, and second, the personal sense of well-being that enables a mother or father to provide consistent nurturing. To acquire skills and self-confidence, affluent families with child-rearing problems can afford individual counseling or parenting classes, while the poor depend on scattered advice and training funded erratically by government.
The emotional side of the coin is more difficult to address. Many of the poor are single mothers who suffer from untreated depression. Many have nobody to talk to about their problems. Introspection and the capacity to reform are luxuries rarely available to a hard-pressed parent at the edge of poverty. If you have been parented badly yourself, if you have minimal education and a deficient network of family and friends, if you are working long nighttime hours and have no savings, then you have no time or money or emotional wherewithal to recharge your batteries or reassess your parenting. “If you are a middle-class parent, you can get away from your children more easily—buy yourself a baby-sitter, a movie, or a health spa,” said Gwen Brown of the University of Delaware. “If you get a break, you can go back fresh.” Nor do crises confront you as frequently. “Your car isn’t breaking down on your way to taking the children someplace,” she noted. “Once every three months there’s a crisis in a middle-class family, and once a week in a poor family. Crises affect how much attention you can pay.”
The parents Gwen and Jackie saw—prisoners and welfare recipients— had few reserves to draw on, like people with depleted bank accounts. “You don’t have much attention to give if you don’t get it,” Gwen said. “You don’t have much love to give if you don’t get it. That’s what we see with parents hurting their children. It’s burnout. They burned out as children because they tried as human beings to reach good relationships and good connections, and they didn’t get good nurturing back, and there’s a kind of going away inside emotionally.… Minds can’t think when there’s too much stress in there.” Furthermore, she observed, in a society where money is power, financial insufficiency may feel like personal inadequacy. So impoverished parents often need assurance that “there’s more of a mind in there than you were able to use.”
Since Gwen and Jackie both grew up in poverty, they were keenly concerned with the psychological deficits among the parents they instructed, and so their courses were designed to provide a kind of therapy. “When I was a teenager, my mother climbed into bed with me and said, ‘I’m so scared,’ ” Jackie remembered. “My mother had nobody to talk to, so it’s so big to me that these people have somebody to talk to.” Or, as she preferred to see it, they needed to talk so that they could guide themselves. “A ll of us as parents need somebody who will listen, just listen to us while we get our turn, because we’re taking care of people all the time, and we very rarely get our turn.” Parents who were brought together in groups assisted one another just by listening and discovering that they weren’t alone.
The classes were designed as safe havens in which parents could uncover their suffering. “People can share at the level they want to share,” Gwen explained. “Maybe they want to talk about their deepest, darkest hurts from childhood. Our goal is to help people get to parts where they can release feelings—a lot of crying, a lot of role-playing, yell back at the parent who abused them.… This is the place for it, but not taking it out on your children. Just because all the men in your childhood were hateful, negative, hostile doesn’t mean that your little boy is going to do something awful.”
The approach seemed to help one mother who had been devoting little attention to her eight-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. “I had, like, so much bottled up inside that I didn’t never look at spending the time,” she said. “Now that a lot of it’s out on the table, I’m not as stressed, and I can spend this time. Instead of worrying about what’s gonna happen tomorrow, I’m spending it with them. It’s like now when I have days off, we go to the park, get ice cream. I didn’t do that before. You know, my son would come home from school, he would do his homework and run outside. But now, he’s like, ‘Momma, we goin’ to the park today?’ And that was never before. So [I say,] ‘Yeah, we can go to the park.’ And then he plays baseball, and I’ve been attending a lot more of his games. When he goes to practice I just don’t drop him off. I stay at practice with him.”
Therapy doesn’t have to mean catharsis, but some form of therapeutic dimension may be necessary for parenting classes to help certain adults. So deep and durable are the ravages of abuse, drugs, mental illness, and other disabilities that “as much as they do love and want to nurture their kids, they can’t,” said Becky Gentes, a registered nurse who led an intensive program of home visits to help young mothers at risk. The women received parenting instruction and intimate mentoring, and also guidance on how to feed, discipline, play, and even love, but to little effect in cases where the wounds still festered.
With some clients “we feel we’re making an impact,” she said. “We see families who are dirt poor. They don’t have a cent, but by God those kids are cared for. They’re sent to school with a piece of fruit, a drink, and a sandwich. There’s no fluff, no junk food. They’re not gonna have designer jeans, they’re not gonna have the latest hairdo, but they’re taken care of. Yo u can be poor and still take care of your children.
“Then there’s a faction that’s really dragging us down—the other extreme. It feels pretty futile.” In those most damaged families, she had to measure the program’s success by what did not occur. “What we’re doing is crisis management,” she said, “just trying to keep those kids safe.… We haven’t had any horrible thing happen, so in some of these cases it’s pretty blatant that it is because we were there that it hasn’t happened. But if we were to pull out tomorrow, well, there’s no long-term change. Most of them would immediately revert right back to the patterns that we started with a year ago.” She and her colleagues, who were all middle-aged, middle-class
women, spiraled into despair at times. “We are questioning what we are doing,” she said one day. “Is this really serving any real purpose? We’re working real hard, but where are the outcomes?”
The young clients were first encountered during pregnancy when they visited the prenatal clinic at Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont, New Hampshire, where Becky was director of maternal-child health services. They were then seen frequently at home until their children turned two, and some of them extended their enrollment, in effect, by getting pregnant again before the cutoff date.
“The repeat pregnancies were clearly driven by our attention,” Becky insisted, “and that got scary to me. They’d come to the prenatal clinic, and it was the first time in their lives where somebody cared about them. You know, they had a nutritionist, a nurse, a doctor, who are all, ‘Hi,’ welcoming them in, ‘Let’s take care of you,’ and ‘How are you doing?’ and we talk and we meet and we have them come back. They thrived on it, and it’s sad because for some of them it truly is the only caring person that’s ever shown up in their life. So of course it’s an incentive to get pregnant again.”
The home visitors became surrogate mothers of a kind, available by phone for questions and cries for help. Sarah Goodell once called her mentor, Brenda St. Laurence, and asked: “If he swears can I put pepper on his tongue? Is it all right to hit him?” She seemed desperate for advice and then ignored it. Her household was deemed so dangerous that the visiting program notified the state, which went to court in an unsuccessful bid to have the youngsters removed. Of the forty mothers in the program, four had lost their children under court order, and another two or three should have, Becky said. Most of the others stood in a twilight zone where the parenting was poor but the physical risk was minimal.
In the worst cases, alarm bells went off at the moment the first newborn was brought home from the hospital. Becky and her colleagues looked for that normal, healthy sense of wonder and exhilaration at the sudden responsibility for a tiny human being. “But do you know what? We don’t see that with our families,” Becky discovered. “That was an eye-opener for us.… How they respond is, ‘Oh, my God, this means I have to get up at what time? Aw, jeez, my husband’s leaving for work and I’ve got to stay with this baby? I’m not changing the diapers.’ There’s not this instant bond,” no anxiety on behalf of the child’s safety or health. “It’s almost like a red flag when you see someone who is not asking the questions, who is not wide-eyed on that first mom-baby visit. You’re worried.”
So, why do they get pregnant and keep the babies? A false sense of independence is induced by the welfare check, some professionals argue, and that dovetails with a yearning for autonomy. “It’s a control thing,” Becky contended. “ ‘By God, I have a baby, no one can tell me I can’t.’ You know, when they’ve been stripped of control of their life all along. That whole warped feeling of ‘somebody in my life who will love me, who needs me.’ ” And yet many of the young mothers are so needy themselves that their need to be taken care of is more compelling than their need to be caretakers. The child is often resented for stealing the teenage mother’s own childhood.
“I’m now in a more difficult phase with my families because they have toddlers,” said Brenda. “They can’t put them in a little crib and keep them there all day. They just want to walk and get into things. Oh, it’s awful some of the things they say to those little toddlers. Like, I have one mom that says her daughter’s ‘evil.’ ”
“There was one the other day that wouldn’t even call her by name,” Becky added, quoting the mother as saying, “ ‘That one is a troublemaker.’ ”
The home visitors worried about the effect on children of seeing violence. Advising one mother who often hit her husband, “I try to say, ‘Get on the floor, get at their level and make believe you’re looking through their eyes,’ ” Brenda said, “ ‘and what do they see?’ ”
What Becky saw was “incredible risk” in some households. In one, where the oldest child was already a mother at age fifteen, “you would see years of substance-abusing people in and out of this home, a mom who is dying [of] terminal liver failure, a stepdad who just died at the age of thirty-six of similar things, foul language, no respect for authority, and a dangerous home in terms of safety. Snakes and dogs and mice [as pets], WIC vouchers may or may not be cashed in, dirty dishes everywhere, law-breaking going on, flare-ups where Mom screams at the kids. The fifteen-year-old would leave the child with whoever happens to be convenient, whether somebody just out of county jail, a neighbor she doesn’t know. I’ve gone into that home where I’m on sensory overload after fifteen minutes. A twelve-year-old comes home from school every day to this. It’s not a place I would leave my kid, much less live there.”
Becky, Brenda, and others who do this kind of work get burned out by the scenes of strife. When they contemplate the implications for the next generation, they often feel utterly useless and defeated. And then, sometimes, out of their gloom will come a beam of good news proving that they do make a difference after all, in ways hard to measure.
It happened to Brenda. She had counseled an eighth-grader from a miserably disrupted home, spent hours a day listening to him, and pressed him to finish school. He ignored her, dropped out, and disappeared. Years later, out of the blue, he called from Virginia to tell her that he had “made it.” He was nineteen, had gotten his G.E.D., was in the military working happily on helicopters, and was engaged to be married. There is always a spark to be fanned into flame.
So it was with “Melissa,” who had been beaten and sexually abused by her father. “She lies all the time,” Brenda lamented. “She doesn’t trust anybody.” At twenty-two, she was living on welfare in a cluttered apartment with her boyfriend and their two-year-old daughter. The boyfriend had been accused of molestation at age sixteen, so he was afraid even to change his daughter’s diapers.
“You would cringe if you walked into that place,” Brenda said. “It is so dirty. She’s been doing good since I’ve been working with her because she knew what days I was coming, and she’d go down and she’d get her dishes done, she’d clean, she’d be all so proud because someone paid attention that she cleaned.… There was rubbish, there was garbage outside.… If you saw the mattress you would die.… Whenever I walked into that place it was so bad.… There was dirty diapers. It was horrible. It was so bad that [the landlord] took pictures and took them to court. It was trashed. A nice apartment, too.”
Yet Melissa was devoting extraordinary efforts to being a mother. “She does not let that little girl out of her sight, even with me,” said Brenda. As if she were walking along a knife edge of risk, Melissa seemed acutely afraid that what had happened to her might happen to her daughter. At least so far, the anxiety was generating something good for the little girl. “I will say one thing,” Brenda conceded. “She reads and reads and reads to her [daughter], and what a difference. That little girl will look like a dirty little Rugrat 90 percent of the time, but she is smart…. She loves that little girl and spends a lot of time with her.”
Melissa found the time in a way that would not have won any points with welfare reformers: She had quit her $6-an-hour job at a paintbrush factory. “Things are complicated when you don’t have any money,” she remarked wryly. “I could go out and get a job, but I feel at her age it’s more beneficial for me to stay home with her. ” And what did she wish for her daughter? “I want her to be whatever she wants to be,” Melissa declared bravely. “She’s gonna finish high school, because that’s the biggest mistake I made. … If she wants to be a ballerina, then she’ll be a ballerina.” Or, a doctor, Melissa added. “Sometimes I’ll look at her and say, ‘You can be whatever you want to be.’ And she will be.”
Chapter Seven
KINSHIP
If we have nothing, we have each other.
—Kara King, mother of three
The fragile life of Tom and Kara King fell apart piece by piece until nothing was left but love and loyalty. The
y lost their jobs, they lost their health, they saw their meager savings melt the way a February thaw eroded the winter’s snow, once fresh and deep, into muddy rivulets behind the rundown house they rented. The only asset that remained was affection, which became their sustenance. Its web of support embraced them and their three children, a few of their key friends, and even a stranger who encountered them one evening.
For many weeks, Tom and Kara had collected scraps of cash, enough to treat themselves and the kids to a restaurant meal—not to celebrate, just to soothe their anxieties a little. Kara needed a bone marrow transplant, she had learned, and so the family went to a truck stop in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where the portions were huge. The two boys held a contest over who could eat more. The family laughed a lot. They talked about their hardships, and snatches of their conversation were overheard by a stranger at the bar. He was a truck driver passing through, a man who got little time with his family.
“I asked the lady for the check,” Kara recalled, “and she said, ‘There’s no check.’ She said, ‘A gentleman at the bar paid your bill.’ I was very offended. I tried to explain to this lady that I didn’t accept charity.” Nothing insulted Kara more than pity. Poverty and sickness infuriated her, and as they drove home to Newport, where they lived beside a junky auto repair shop, she boiled and brooded. She had lost her long chestnut hair from chemotherapy, her teeth from lack of funds for dental care, her stamina, her gaiety. She was not about to lose her dignity as well. So she called the truck stop and demanded the name of the benefactor. He was still there, the waitress said, and she handed him the phone. Kara asked him frostily why he had paid, and he told her. “He had never heard a family discuss problems that openly,” she said. “We were so close-knit, and he was a truck driver on the road a lot and just wanted to do something for us. He was touched. This man couldn’t believe we could laugh at life like that.”
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