Clinic Offers Parents Class to Minorities

A clinic in Highland Park has become the setting for an experimental program to teach low-income, Spanish-speaking Mexican-American parents the skills they need to care for their infants.

“Modern Parents,” or “Padres Modernos,” is a Spanish-language version of a 10-week program called Minnesota Early Learning Design (MELD), developed in 1973 to teach parenting skills to middle-income Caucasian families and used in 90 cities throughout the United States.

The Carnegie Corp., the James Irving Foundation and Stuart Foundations are paying for a four-year, $500,000 pilot program to adapt the curriculum to low-income Mexican-Americans who do not speak English.

Highland Park, with its heavy Mexican-American population, was identified by MELD as an ideal setting for the experiment. Northeast Community Clinic on Figueroa Street, which already provided medical, legal and psychological assistance to nearby residents, agreed to give “Padres Modernos” a try.

MELD officials say little or no research has been done on Latino parenting programs that concern children younger than 2 years old, and they hope to fill this void by developing a culturally specific curriculum that can identify and correct developmental problems in the early stages of the infant’s life.

On Saturday, the third group of the pilot project got under way. Participants sat on folding chairs, forming a circle in the clinic’s small classroom--two couples expecting their first children, a pregnant woman, a young mother, two social workers and volunteer Toni Valdez, a mother of eight who acted as discussion leader.

After a round of introductions, Valdez reminded the group why they were meeting with the social workers.

“There’s a lot of information from the American psychologists and sociologists that we can use, mixed with what we’ve learned from our experience,” Valdez said in Spanish. “We have always adapted to different customs in order to survive, without losing touch with our roots. That’s why we are ‘Modern Parents,’ ” she said. The participants nodded and smiled.

Child Abuse

The subject of this meeting was child abuse. Valdez asked Maria Santana, one of the MELD social workers, to talk about sexual molestation.

Sexual abuse by parents, baby-sitters and relatives is more prevalent than most people suspect, Santana explained. “Know your babies’ bodies,” she warned the parents. “Open their little legs, look for bruises and watch for abnormal behavior too, like excessive crying or if the baby is afraid of somebody. Sometimes rapists don’t leave marks.”

For two hours, they talked about different forms of sexual, physical and verbal child abuse and how to prevent it. Santana and Eddy Farias, the social workers, identified the problems. Valdez, a feisty, talkative and often funny figure, interjected anecdotes from her own experiences and told of some mistakes she made in raising children. The parents seemed at ease. Slowly, they began asking questions.

“Sometimes one baby is darker than another, and people treat them differently,” Adelina Verdugo said. “Some people think the one with the lighter skin will be smarter and better looking. Is this true?

Nonsense, Farias replied. This kind of inadvertent discrimination is just as dangerous as it is prevalent. The darker child suffers from a lack of self-esteem, and the lighter child may feel that he cannot fulfill his parents’ expectations.

“What’s the difference between the way American parents raise their children and the Mexican way of doing it?” Antonio Zepeda asked.

American parents tend to stress individualism and personal achievement, whereas in Mexico there is more emphasis on the unity of the extended family, Farias answered.

Role of Church

Also, he said, the Catholic Church plays a bigger role in the education process in Mexico, with the local priest often serving as the family adviser. In the United States, on the other hand, religion is more focused on satisfying spiritual needs, Farias said.

These are precisely the type of questions that the “Padres Modernos” curriculum needs to address before it is fully developed and ready to use, said Karen Leaf, MELD evaluation coordinator.

“The idea is not to tell parents what’s right and what’s wrong, but to analyze and examine both cultures so parents can choose what values to pass on to the child. We want to empower parents,” she said.

“This is a group of parents that traditionally has not a received a lot of attention from service providers or the academic community,” she added.

The MELD method combines the professional experience of trained child-care experts with the practical experience of a “volunteer parent coordinator” whose role is to bridge the cultural gap between the experts and group participants by relating the discussion topics to anecdotes and personal experiences that group members can relate to.

So far, Leaf said, the “Padres Modernos” experience has proven at least one thing: that the need for such a program exists. “One of the biggest questions we had was whether people would come voluntarily, and we’ve discovered that, yes, people really want it and need it,” she said.

Thanks in no small part to Farias’ extensive recruiting efforts in churches, clinics and schools, about 40 parents have participated in the program to date. More importantly, most have stayed in touch after the sessions, Farias said. “They are developing a support system similar to the one that was traditionally provided by the extended family, which, in most cases, remains behind in Mexico when a young couple immigrates to the U. S.”

Latino Experts

In addition to the input from its Los Angeles-based staff, MELD has asked a range of Latino experts to comment on the curriculum draft--a series of booklets that illustrate and address such topics as “The Baby Plays” and “Child Security and Emergencies”--and has interviewed 150 young Mexican-American parents. Plans are under way to kick off a “Padres Modernos” program in the Northeast Valley Health Corp. in Pacoima to complement the one already in place in Highland Park.

“What we did is link up with Hispanic agencies and community leaders,” said Ann Elwood, MELD executive director. “We took our technical skills and combined them with their cultural and environmental skills.”

Elwood hopes that once the curriculum is developed, it can be made available nationwide at a cost of $30,000 to $60,000 to schools, churches and community centers.

Sheila Smith, a spokeswoman for the Carnegie Corp.--the main funder of the pilot program--said the possibility of developing a national curriculum for a neglected group was what prompted Carnegie to get involved.

“As a national foundation, we’re interested in early-childhood programs for low-income groups, and we’re particularly interested in potential for much wider application,” she said.

The MELD program “will help us know if this type of curriculum can be useful to the community and to Hispanics throughout the country,” she said.

Toni Valdez, for one, is a believer already. “Sometimes I look back at the way I raised my children, and it’s a miracle that they are still healthy,” she said after the meeting.

For example, “when their nose bled, I made them lie down on their stomachs until they got all the blood out of their system, like my grandma taught me. Years later, when I took a first aid class, I found out I was supposed to do the exact opposite. I said, ‘Oh my God! How could I ever do something like that?’

“That’s why it’s important to read, to be informed and to attend discussions like today’s. Because even people who don’t have an education, they listen and some things rub off on them.”