PARENT HELP : To Protect Children From Possible Abuse, Volunteers Assist Mothers Under Stress

Two-year-old Jessica’s face lights up when she sees the pink bakery box. Nobody has to tell her what’s inside. She runs toward the table, climbs on a chair and stares down, beaming.

Jessica’s surprise birthday party is four days late, but she isn’t complaining. Parent Help USA volunteer Carole Mangum lights the candles on the cake she has brought and sings “Happy Birthday,” solo. Then she sings it again, encouraging the other children--Jessica’s younger sister, Helen, her 5-year-old Aunt Yesina and her 4-year-old Uncle Felipe--to sing along.

For six months Mangum has been providing assistance to Jessica’s teen-age mother, Marisol Molina. Mangum was recruited to the job by Parent Help USA, an outreach service that seeks to prevent stressful family situations from turning into abusive ones.

Marisol was referred to the group last November by a high school counselor because she hadn’t enough money for food or Christmas presents for her children. Marisol is not an abusive parent, Mangum said, but she’s nevertheless seen as being at risk because of the stress of being a very young mother with little emotional or financial support available to her.

Marisol lives with her mother, stepfather, five younger siblings, her two children and an older sister in a small Santa Ana apartment. In May she dropped out of high school to look for work to help pay the rent and support her children. Not eligible for welfare while she lives with her mother, Marisol doesn’t receive much financial support from her children’s father.

Marisol didn’t have enough money to provide a birthday party for Jessica. “The only help I get is from Carole,” she said. “She helps me when I need food. She goes to a place to get food for me, lots of food for my family. Once I needed money, and she gave me money. When I needed diapers, she took me to the store and bought diapers. She bought the stroller cart.”

The money was provided by Parent Help.

Parent Help is a branch of Mothers and Others Against Child Abuse, a Huntington Beach-based, nonprofit organization founded in 1985 to provide parenting classes, information, food, toys and caring volunteer assistance to families considered at risk of child abuse because of high stress in their lives. The outreach service was named Parent Help USA so those who need it won’t be scared away.

“We aren’t against parents who hurt their children; we’re for helping to prevent them from hurting their children,” said Sally Nava Kanarek, 43, founder and volunteer director of Mothers and Others. “Our theory is, if we provide help to the parents, we won’t need to provide shelters for children. Behind every case of child abuse is a hurting parent.”

Kanarek estimates that Parent Help provides parenting information to about 1,200 families a year, with about half those receiving a visit or series of visits from trained volunteers. About 40 of Parent Help’s 200 volunteers work with 25 to 40 families a month. More volunteers are needed to handle a waiting list of about 36 families.

Kanarek believes that volunteers, under the supervision of trained therapists, can make a huge difference in the lives of troubled families. “You can interrupt a family that has known only generations of abuse by interjecting a caring volunteer like Carole Mangum and helping them see you don’t have to react with hostility every time a child reacts as a child,” she said.

Services are offered free, and many clients are teen mothers like Marisol. Others are parents of chronically ill or handicapped children who need breaks from their constant care-giving. Children in these families, where frustrations often run high, are at great risk of abuse, Kanarek said.

“It’s not intentional abuse, of course, but the result is the same,” she said. “My dream is that we get to those families before they start hurting those children.”

Occasionally Parent Help workers find evidence of actual abuse and are then required by law to report the families to the Child Abuse Registry of Orange County.

In many cases, however, the volunteers’ presence prevents abuse from happening, Kanarek said. “If one in four families across the board is abusive, and we’re working with high-risk families, the chances are that one in two of our families are abusive,” she said. “The best way to keep the abuse at a minimum is to be right there with them. The idea is, if it (abuse) is there, we’re going to see it.”

The need for preventive services like Parent Help is critical, says Kanarek, who rattles off a stream of statistics about child abuse: In Orange County alone, more than 1,100 cases of child abuse are reported each month. Nationwide, about 2,000 children every year are brain-damaged at the hands of abusive parents; up to 5,000 children die yearly from child abuse; 30% of all child abuse is to children under 1 year old, and child abuse is the No. 1 cause of death for those under 1 year of age.

Within Orange County, several government-funded agencies provide counseling support and respite care to families that have been reported for child abuse. UPP BEAT (Understanding Pregnancy and Parenting: Better Efforts to Assist Teens), a state-funded agency administered by the Orange County Health Care Agency, also works with teen mothers who are seen as being at risk for abuse.

But Mothers and Others claims to be the only preventive, private, volunteer-operated service of its kind in Southern California. The organization, which has a $55,000 budget for 1989, is funded through small grants and private donations.

Robert Malmberg, director of the Child Abuse Registry, said his public agency’s contact with Mothers and Others has been limited to providing some training for the group’s volunteers. While he’s had little exposure to results of the group’s work, Malmberg said, Mothers and Others may well help fill a gap in county services because most public agencies intervene only after a report of child abuse has been made.

Parent Help holds monthly parent education classes and support group meetings. A parent education library stocked with books and videotapes is maintained at the Mothers and Others headquarters. A family resource network also offers links to other agencies. Through a food and clothing bank, basic living supplies are provided to needy families, and at Christmas, toys and other gifts are also distributed.

Many clients are referred by schools and other agencies, while some find the group through its information line, (714) 843-LOVE or (800) 654-STOP. Parent Help’s work has been featured on several local and national television news shows, and it has drawn support from politicians, celebrities and public school staff.

Joyce Stone, a counselor with the Garden Grove Unified School District’s Teen Mother Program, calls Parent Help “a very valuable service for the girls who are especially at risk. When a caring adult will validate that (a girl) is important enough to spend time with, that is very enhancing as far as self-esteem.”

Carole Mangum, 46, joined Parent Help last October. Now the organization’s assistant supervisor of volunteers, she’s involved with several cases but works closely only with Marisol, visiting her one to three times a week. (Most volunteers make such visits only once a week.)

“I know we’re supposed to be parent aides and even a sort of family, but I really feel Marisol’s my friend,” Mangum said. “It’s more on an equal level. She’s a very good little mom. I’ve been very impressed with her. She seems to have wisdom above her years. And her resourcefulness--my goodness! I’ve learned (from) the way she has of making ends meet.”

Occasionally Mangum has also taken Marisol to a movie or a park, or to governmental offices to try to straighten out citizenship papers for Jessica, who was born in Mexico. (Marisol, an American citizen, went to Mexico with her boyfriend shortly before her first baby was due.)

Yet accepting such help is not easy for Marisol. Mangum said the girl is “prideful.”

“I see that as a positive thing. I told her, ‘You know, it makes me feel so good when you ask me for something.’ She said, ‘It does?’ I said, ‘It shows me you trust me.’ She never asks for anything for herself.” Instead, Marisol only asks for help for her children, Mangum said.

Since the birthday party, Marisol has found a full-time job and plans to attend adult-education vocational night classes this summer while using a baby-sitter’s services. Mangum is trying to find Marisol housing away from her mother’s crowded home, and she’s also trying to win her more financial help from government agencies so Marisol can finish high school.

“There are all these different agencies that have different services, but God--trying to get to them,” Mangum said. Once a month the Parent Help volunteers meet with a clinical psychologist, Ginna Siskowicz, to discuss such problems. “We get together and almost tear our hair out trying to figure out how to get to these resources, so you can imagine how a (young mother) with two screaming babies feels,” Mangum said.

“Part of that monthly volunteer meeting is our own support group,” she added. “Because the burnout rate is very high. These girls are very stressed, and you become stressed as you try to help them.”

Kanarek co-founded Mothers and Others four years ago with Ruth Purdy, a Huntington Beach marriage, family and child counselor who’s now the organization’s co-director.

Kanarek was inspired to start the group through her involvement with a Buena Park-based group, the Exchange Club Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse. Through this group, Kanarek learned a lot about how hard it can be for women with few resources and low self-esteem to care for themselves and their families.

A petite, dark-haired woman who talks about the importance of child abuse prevention with great fervor, Kanarek is now going through some hard times of her own. She’s getting divorced and has been working as a part-time real estate agent while still putting in full-time volunteer hours directing Mothers and Others. The mother of five children, Kanarek has two young daughters still at home.

Her personal history played a large part in her desire to start Mothers and Others. “My father had 13 children, and he just adored us, but he was abusive sometimes,” she said. Experiencing abuse as a child influences the rest of a person’s life, Kanarek said. Some of her brothers and sisters were permanently scarred. “Some were not survivors. There was a suicide in my family, and a lot of us have gone through counseling.

“Child abuse to me is a euphemism. It’s more than harsh treatment or hard words. In some families they actually torture the children. . . . The problem is we spend all our money on homes for abused children, and we spend very little on prevention.

“Through education and legislation, the attitude toward the abuse of children can change. Everyone thinks the abusive parent is a monster. He’s not.” Instead, she said, abusive parents are ordinary people who need help. “We don’t need to have every family go to counselors. The person next door can help by giving that (over-stressed) parent a break. It’s something we can take care of in our own neighborhoods.”

Someday, Kanarek said, she would like to open a shelter for teen mothers. She also hopes to establish a crisis nursery, to take in children when their parents are desperate for a break from responsibilities.

Michele Vallens of Garden Grove is among those on the receiving end of Parent Help’s efforts. Vallens, 35, has found the group’s open-to-the-public lectures informative, and she greatly appreciates the respite care services Parent Help provides for her son, Jonathan.

Jonathan, 4, has severe cerebral palsy. He requires constant care from someone trained to take care of a handicapped child with a gastrotomy tube (inserted into the stomach), through which he’s fed.

Jonathan is the only child of Vallens and her husband, Larry, who have been married nine years. Jonathan was born a month late and suffered asphyxiation during birth. The lack of oxygen caused brain damage. Today Jonathan can’t walk or talk.

“So many people ask me, ‘Why go through this? Why not just place Jonathan (in an institution)?’ ” Vallens said. “My feeling is I want to take care of my child as long as I can. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to physically carry him.”

Vallens estimates that she took Jonathan to more than 200 doctors’ appointments a year during his first two years. Since April, 1988, the boy has attended the Gill Educational Center in Huntington Beach, a special education school.

“This last year was like a breather,” Vallens said. Even before Jonathan was accepted at Gill, she had started working as a secretary at a private French-English elementary school. “While I was answering the phone with one hand, I was holding Jonathan with the other. It was very difficult,” she said.

Vallens is now an administrator at the school. “The big problem when you have a child like Jonathan and hold a job at the same time is when he’s sick, you cannot find much help. So you’re left very isolated,” she said. “It’s true of any parent, but any parent can find a next-door baby-sitter. We have to call upon a nurse or someone trained to work with these children.”

Now Vallens can sometimes call on Parent Help, and the organization sends out a nurse. (The nurse is partly volunteer, partly paid by Parent Help.) Vallens is eligible for a maximum of 16 hours of respite care from Parent Help each month, and 24 hours a month from the Developmental Disabilities Center of Orange County. There is no charge for these services. It isn’t enough time off, but it helps, Vallens said.

She can easily see the potential for child abuse in a situation like hers, Vallens said. “I love my child too much to ever be able to hurt him, ever,” she said. Yet, especially during those first few years, “the temptation was there. Nights he couldn’t sleep, he’d scream--he’d only get two hours of sleep a night. The stress would get so much I’d feel like hitting him.

“This situation can break a family very easily. Just because the demands and the needs are so overwhelming,” Vallens said. “Your life revolves around your child, basically. Many families do not survive that. Luckily we did. In the worst of times, when I was so low, so suicidal, Larry was there to pick up the pieces, take over. And then when Larry was feeling so low, like he was losing his mind, I was there.”

Being able, now, to take some time off from their cares is very healthy, Vallens said: “The respite time is just more valuable than gold.”