Making a Good Mother : Teens: Troubled girls who wind up at the Crittenton Center may not like its food or strict rules, but some leave with a high school diploma and hope for a better future for their children.
Lucy remembers her arrival at the Crittenton Center three years ago: “It felt so good not to be handcuffed and shackled.”
Then 14 years old and six months pregnant, she had been transferred to the Lincoln Heights facility by her probation officer after a month in Juvenile Hall. “I’d started running away from home, ditching school,” she recalls. “I started getting into trouble--gangs, drugs, violence. I was into stealing cars. One day I got caught.”
Just once does Lucy’s dimpled smile disappear as she tells her story. Struggling with her composure, she talks about her initial plans to give her baby up for adoption:
“I seen her, and when I seen her--God!” Lucy says, throwing her head back to shut off her welling emotions. “I just--I couldn’t give her up. I knew that thought would go with me the rest of my life. I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna keep her and I’m gonna try my best.’ ”
And try her best she has.
Earlier this summer, Lucy, now 17, joined three others in the first graduating class of Crittenton High School, which started last September as part of the center’s residential treatment program for abused and neglected adolescent girls and their infants.
By all reports graduation was an emotional, proud ceremony, complete with pale-blue academic gowns. And few moments were more tearful than when a poised Lucy--honor student, marathon runner, award winner and dedicated mother--came forward, telling the other girls to keep trying, that they could make it.
This month, she starts classes at Pasadena Community College, helped by several scholarships. No longer Crittenton residents, Lucy and her daughter, almost 3, live in a foster home arranged by the center.
She still has connections to Crittenton, working part time in its nursery. Lucy saves every penny she can, she says, pointing toward her 19th birthday, when probation ends and mother and daughter will be on their own.
Lucy says she has not seen her old crowd, the people with whom she found trouble, since her arrest: “That’s not a life for (my daughter). I want to be a role model for her.”
Still, her former life haunts. Lucy is not her real name. Unsettled accounts from past associations are dangerous, and a recent threat prompted Lucy and her social worker to request anonymity.
Lucy is clearly a Crittenton success story. Sharrell Blakeley, the center’s executive director, and Susan Newman, its director of education, point to her as an example of what the center and its new high school can help bring about.
They acknowledge ruefully, however, that it is an uphill battle for staff and residents alike. Although Blakeley, Newman and other staff members describe the center as home--and its atmosphere as one of positive reinforcement and caring--the girls don’t always see it that way.
Crittenton Center, 100 years old next year, started as a home for single mothers seeking refuge until their babies were born.
Blakeley describes those residents as “sweet.” Current residents are termed “tremendous kids;” sweet no longer applies.
The center has evolved into a residential facility for about 40 girls referred by either the county Probation Department or Department of Children’s Services. Whether in trouble or being removed from trouble, Blakeley says there is little difference: “It’s the same kid; the same record; the same neighborhood. We just get them at a different time.”
The residents, as Blakeley puts it, “do not knock at the front door” to be taken in; they are there involuntarily. And although no locked gates keep them in, to leave without permission is to go AWOL. Punishment may range from restrictions to expulsion.
Abuse and neglect, whether from dysfunctional families, the wrong companions, impersonal institutions or an uncaring society, do not necessarily produce abject victims. The girls may hurt greatly on the inside and feel frightened, abandoned and confused, but that is not the demeanor they present to the world. They are tough and have learned not to trust.
Lily Martin, 17, arrived at the center when daughter Jasmine was 2 days old. Somewhat put off by the question, she grudgingly says she’s here because she had beat up a girl who pressed charges. She used to fight a lot and ditch school. She has been at Crittenton for six months.
Lily has something of a model’s looks and bearing. Short of playing with Jasmine, nothing makes her face light up more than a reference to her appearance.
“I’ve got a whole photo album of me,” she says. “I think I’m photogenic.”
Often, however, she offers an “I dare you” look rather than a smile. She sometimes seems bored, restless, dejected--not exactly 100% “with the program.”
Lily flatly says the center is not “home.” Home is her grandmother’s house, where she would rather be, except that too many people live there. She complains about Crittenton’s food, about being unale to walk out the door, about all the restrictions. Lily says she doesn’t talk to staff members about her problems; she calls the other girls “associates, never friends” and darkly mutters about people “talking behind your back.”
For all that toughness, though, she smiles fondly when she talks of being a “birthing coach” for two residents: “I like helping them out when they’re scared and crying, telling them everything’s going to be OK.”
Later, Lily walks into math class and gently pats a pregnant classmate’s swollen abdomen as a greeting.
Sitting at the circular worktable, hovering over a paper with pencil in hand, she prepares for her math competency test, which she must pass to graduate. She labors, talking softly to herself. Lily hands her paper to teacher Sandra Lee, saying, “I’m out of breath now.”
At first she says the school is “all right,” but that she prefers regular school. Then Lily admits she used to be “tending to my friends and not looking at the blackboard.”
She arrived at Crittenton not knowing how “to divide, multiply, but once I got here, I learned all of that.” And she mentions goals the center staff would be proud of: “I want to get a job, make something of myself, take care of my little baby, try to be independent on my own.”
Still, Lily tends to attribute her motivation not to the center but to her daughter: “I’ve changed a whole lot since the baby. . . . It makes you more mature, like you’re a woman, like you’re doing something. You are.”
Earlier this year, Children Now, a nonprofit advocacy group, reported that births to unmarried teens are increasing in California, with an average of 174 per day. Los Angeles County’s rate is among the highest.
Although about half of its 40 residents are neither pregnant nor mothers, the Crittenton Center is the only facility in the county where mothers with children under 3 can live until they are 18.
Crittenton High, certified by the state Department of Education and operated under the auspices of Los Angeles Unified School District, is also unique. According to Judy Maizlish, who monitors non-public schools for the district, it is the only school in the county “that provides an overall program for pregnant girls and young mothers.”
In addition to academic classes, mothers have mandatory parenting and child development classes, and all residents take a course in pregnancy prevention. According to national research by Children’s Defense Fund, the majority of teen-age mothers do not finish high school.
Attendance is mandatory at Crittenton High. Every day. Every class. With class sizes averaging about three or four students, the atmosphere is not conducive to playing hooky.
Until last year, the center rented space to Los Angeles County. Two “very dedicated” teachers, Blakeley says, tried to work “with 40 emotionally disturbed girls with learning handicaps.” The odds were impossible.
Now, as Newman describes it, the school has two instructional goals--”providing the required high school curriculum and modeling appropriate school behavior.”
Appropriate is a much-used word at Crittenton, and the girls know it well. They sometimes use it to sass and taunt.
One young woman recited a mash list of invectives against the center: “nasty” food, uncaring counselors, rooms cleaned up only because there are visitors. When a staff member came by, the young resident halted and asked her pointedly to leave, finally informing her firmly, “I am trying to be appropriate.”
The school’s educational and behavior goals tend to mix informally.
Sitting around a kitchen table where science class was in session, teaching assistant Linda Monroe barely drew a breath between telling a girl sucking on a pacifier, “Take that thing out of your mouth,” and asking, “Now, who can tell me what technology is?”
Back in the director’s office, Blakeley and Newman attempt to describe what goes on at Crittenton.
“It’s the whole concept of helping young women who are really kids underneath and never got to be kids,” Newman says. Blakeley finishes the thought: “And are likely to be single breadwinners for a long time.”
Something seems to have taken. At times, perhaps unconsciously, the girls see it that way themselves:
In another science class, teacher Victor Wilson and a young woman, the only student, are momentarily sidetracked from a give-and-take about gravity. The girl’s argumentative nature almost seems to help her concentrate.
When something comes up about goals, she informs Wilson that she has a lot of goals. “The first one is to get the hell out of here. I want to be on my own during the day; be in the real world.”
Wilson challenges her: “What type of job are you going to get?”
She shrugs, saying “I don’t know. I’ll need to take a course.” Then, sounding her most defiant, she adds, “I will get my high school diploma.”
