Young Family Looking for Grandparents Wants to ‘Adopt’ a Senior

Having a grandparent around for 3-month-old Jessica Arbital is an important part of her growing process, so parents Linda and Jeffrey Arbital of Newport Beach have decided to adopt one. Well, sort of.

“I think a grandparent has a lot to offer a child,” said Linda, 30, who moved with her engineer husband from Tennessee where their parents live. “Grandparents offer different things than parents, such as sharing their lifetime of experiences.”

Besides providing Jessica a chance to relate to an older person, “I’m thinking more in the terms of fun things grandparents offer,” she added, “like how they’re able to make things out of nothing instead of buying something.”

That ability, according to Jan Kincaid, outreach coordinator for the Oasis Senior Center in Corona del Mar, who is attempting to match senior citizens with an adoptive grandchild, can result in a long-term connection with a family and their children.

She is accepting applications from prospective grandparents and families that want to adopt them and the Arbitals are now in the interviewing process.

“It’s a natural matchup if you can get the people together,” Kincaid said. “I feel some real bonding can happen between people. It can be an enriching, stimulating and heart-warming experience.”

Besides that, Kincaid said, the family of the adopted grandchild becomes part of the relationship and a family bond can develop through that association. She also feels it’s a way to stem prejudice younger children sometimes develop toward older people.

She notes that because of high mobility, families are often separated by hundreds and thousands of miles, making grandparents unavailable to children and vice versa.

Linda Arbital knows it will take time for an adoptive grandparent to build a relationship with her child, even with visits on a fairly regular basis. She points out that the real grandparents only have the opportunity to visit twice yearly.

“I’m sure both our parents will be happy that Jessica can have the relationship,” Linda said. “It’s not that someone is taking their place. It’s just that Jessica will have an older friend.”

Another sign of the times. Chapman College in Orange signed Paul Kahn, 37, of Long Beach as women’s basketball coach and Linda Laye, 25, of Orange as men’s water polo coach.

There’s a message of some sort in this.

Gary W. Goldacker was a recruiter for Mobil Oil Corp. in Wyoming when the oil glut and worldwide plunge in oil prices forced a cutback in hiring, eliminating his job.

But Goldacker had other irons in the fire, so to speak. He has a divinity degree and took a position as associate rector at All-Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, where he found a large Jewish and Middle Eastern population. “I found out what it feels like to be in a minority religious group,” he said.

It was quite a change from his upbringing in small towns in the Midwest. Last June, however, Goldacker was named pastor of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Anaheim. “It’s like returning to suburbia,” he said.

And as an afterthought: “Sometimes I wonder whether these changes mean we’re fooling around with energy of some sort.”

Only God knows.

In some lower economic groups, many families don’t have toothbrushes and in some cases, it forces everyone to share the one they have. But some school districts, according to dental hygienist Shea Shannon, 38, of Newport Beach, are having children brush their teeth and get fluoride rinses at school each day.

“This is really a marvelous program that’s cutting down cavities and teaching children the value of good dental health,” said Shannon, just named president of the California Dental Hygienists’ Assn.

She said additional state funds are being sought to spread the project throughout the state and notes that schools in Garden Grove and Santa Ana are heavily into the brushing program.

Acknowledgments--Candace Fields, 16, of Garden Grove, was crowned Junior Miss Dance of America, winning over 70 nationwide competitors in Syracuse, N.Y. The Pacifica High School junior has been studying dance since age 5.