‘Friends’ Give Families Gift of Time

When David Stone isn’t playing with his 3-year-old daughter, Bari, who has mild cerebral palsy, he’s making her breakfast, taking her to speech therapy, or staying with her at preschool.

“I don’t have a lot of time to do what I have to do,” said David, a part-time actor who takes care of Bari while his wife, Mollie, works at an insurance company.

But once a week, David Stone gets a break.

Pearl Rosen, 69, comes to the Stones’ North Hollywood home to play with Bari, who is just learning to speak and has the skills of a child half her age. While Rosen and Bari sing and play on Bari’s swing, Stone gets some free time and peace of mind.

“It’s the little things I can do, like reading a newspaper or getting the laundry folded,” Stone said. “Sometimes I’ll just shut the door and play the piano.”

Rosen is a volunteer with Family Friends Project, a program that matches men and women age 55 and above with the families of chronically ill and disabled children.

“The family gets a special friend, someone to help the child with homework, play with siblings, spend time with the parents. And for the older person, it’s an opportunity to feel needed, to feel a part of society again,” said Susie Forer-Dehry, the program’s director.

The program is financed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of Princeton, N.J., which is sponsoring eight such programs nationwide to study how sick children and mature people benefit from each other.

Locally, the program is sponsored by Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles and UCLA Medical Center, which donates office space.

The program’s four-year grant runs out in October, 1990, and Forer-Dehry is applying for grants to keep it going. She said the program needs $150,000 a year for salaries of its four staffers and to provide $30 a month to each of the 60 volunteers for gasoline and food expenses.

David and Mollie Stone say they are grateful to have Rosen, who has been helping them out for a year.

“Parents like us don’t get a chance to get out,” Mollie Stone said. “You’re not going to leave a 14-year-old to baby-sit your child . . . who has seizures and other disorders.”

She said Rosen also provides perspective on Bari’s growth. “I’m so absorbed in the whole thing that sometimes I don’t notice. It’s nice when Pearl says, ‘I really see a change.’ ”

Rosen, meanwhile, says playing with Bari is one of the highlights of her week.

“I’m getting a lot more than I’m giving,” said Rosen, who has worked with disabled children as a teaching assistant.

Though many of the volunteers play with the youngsters to give parents free time, some, like Ann Lauterbach, spend most of the allotted time with the parents, providing emotional support and helping relieve stress.

“It’s very hard to have a child like this who has virtually no future,” says Candice Naiditch, whose 4-year-old son is retarded. “This is someone who brings warmth and friendship and love. We talk, we shop, we eat, we cry. Our lives have just become intermingled.”

Naiditch said older people offer qualities that others can’t. “They’ve been through so much, and you can really learn a lot from them. They really approach it with the maturity that a peer volunteer would not.”

The best part of the program, Naiditch said, is that the volunteers don’t criticize the parents--”You can never have too many grandmas, but who needs another mother to tell you what to do?”

For information, call (818) 761-3447.