Respect Is Mutual at This Foster Home

One summer afternoon two years ago, Covie O’Cadiz took her new foster daughter--a tattooed and sullen 16-year-old--out to the porch of her Santa Ana home. In a casual mix of English and Spanish, she explained the rules the girl must follow to live there.

She would be expected to sit down with the family every night for dinner. She would contribute to household chores. She would honor a 10 p.m. curfew, midnight on weekends. Above all, as the girl would hear nearly every day, she would “stay in school.”

Maricella Beltran was skeptical. Most adults in her life had given her rules, but then she made a mistake, and they said she would not amount to much. A drug-dependent gang member who went to school only when she felt like it, she was so hopeless about her future that she had taken a suicidal overdose when she was 12.

But here, she said she came to realize in time, was finally someone who not only laid down rules but expected her to do well--and actually believed she could.

Now a confident 18, she has a high school diploma, a schedule of community college classes, a job in a law firm, a red Honda she bought herself--and a grateful feeling for O’Cadiz. “She’s the mother and father I should have had a long time ago,” she said.

Beltran, O’Cadiz said, is not much different from the other troubled teen-age girls on probation she has taken in over the past four years. “They’re not bad,” she insisted. “They just need direction.”

On May 12, O’Cadiz will be one of three foster parents honored by the Orange County Board of Supervisors, as well as the County Social Services Agency, Orangewood Children’s Foundation and the Southern Area Foster Care Effort.

The others are: David and Nan Reger of Fullerton, who have cared for medically fragile and substance-exposed babies since 1967; and Janet Zaughan of Fullerton, who has cared for 106 newborns, primarily heroin addicts, who would otherwise have been institutionalized.

County officials said O’Cadiz stands out partly because she provides a caring family for girls whose criminal pasts frighten away other potential foster parents. In addition, there are not enough Latino foster parents in the county, and O’Cadiz offers a badly needed role model for girls who have seen little beyond the worlds of gangs, drugs, crime or welfare.

Foster care officials said it is important to place a child in an “ethnically appropriate” family to lessen the trauma of relocation.

“If a child is placed in a home where the sounds are different and the smells coming from the kitchen are different, that just exacerbates the sense of trauma that child feels,” said Barbara Labitzke, executive director of the Southern Area Fostercare Effort in Orange.

“Imagine a child noticing all his life his skin is darker than his parents’. They don’t speak Spanish. He may be taunted at school,” she said.

“There are all kinds of things that really make a child feel out of place, even though he may love his foster parents or adoptive parents very much. Especially at adolescence, this identity crisis comes to the fore.”

A Mexico City native, O’Cadiz, 55, raised four children of her own, largely as a single parent, working for the Santa Ana Unified School District as a truant officer.

(She remains friendly with her former husband, Sergio O’Cadiz, a well-known local artist. His paintings fill the walls of her home.)

Three of her own children have completed college; two are pursuing advanced degrees. Her extended family is close and cosmopolitan, with sons- and daughters-in-law from India, Norway and Spain. Another is Japanese-American.

Her daughter, Pilar, a doctoral candidate at UCLA, lives in converted quarters on the property with her husband and two children and helps the foster girls with their homework or takes them out for pizza or to the beach.

O’Cadiz became a foster parent four years ago, after her children left home. She said she became “lonesome” when she realized that she had no one to help.

Now she has two foster daughters at home: Beltran and a 17-year-old (who cannot be named) who had been arrested with her live-in boyfriend for drug possession. (“We don’t want to see him, right?” she tells the girl fondly.)

The girl is also scheduled to graduate this year (“She will graduate. It’s not maybe, right?”) and plans to move in with a girlfriend. (O’Cadiz nodded in approval of the friend: “She has values.”)

Some of her girls have had difficult transitions into independence.

One 17-year old, a gang member who had been living in a group home, became pregnant. Still, she graduated from high school and started college classes. She brings her baby by to visit.

Another girl, an incest victim, also became pregnant and has moved away.

As for sex, O’Cadiz said she tells the girls, “Don’t do it, but if you’re going to do it, take care of yourself.” Doctor appointments for birth control are up to them.

“I cannot do it for them,” O’Cadiz said. “I am here to answer questions and give directions.”

In dealing with teen-agers, O’Cadiz relies less on mainstream “parenting techniques” than on her own philosophies and strategies, laced with faith, guilt and forgiveness.

“You have to trust them, show them you trust them and are there to give them advice--even if they don’t want it,” she said. “It does register.”

The girls say she is not especially strict. “But she sets up expectations and expects you to live up to them,” Pilar O’Cadiz said.

Other house rules include no friends at home when O’Cadiz is not there and tell her where they are at all times. O’Cadiz said she did not forbid her own or her foster children to choose their friends but insisted that she meet them first.

“If you tell them not to (see a friend), they’re going to,” she said. “I don’t say not to go out with someone. I say bring one here and watch TV. I swallow it (criticism) and in three weeks, they say, ‘You were right.’ ”

“When you fail, or make a mistake, you always get a second chance,” Pilar O’Cadiz said, adding that her mother is understanding “as long as you show you’re making an effort.”

Beltran said she remembers one night when she came home late and drunk. Not only was she grounded for a month but felt the sting of guilt. “She didn’t say, ‘You’re bad and will never change.’ . . . She said, ‘I trusted you. I love you. You’re smart, why are you doing this?’

“She forgives you, but I feel so guilty,” she said. “It’s like a trick. It’s worse than yelling or hitting me.”

Although foster parent reimbursement money (which starts at $750 a month for probation teen-agers) runs out when the foster child turns 18, O’Cadiz said Beltran can stay at her home on the sole condition that she continue her college education.

Beltran plans, however, to return home to her mother while she works and attends night school. “I feel I am all she has to look forward to,” she said.

O’Cadiz proudly related how she overheard Beltran tell a young friend: “Don’t be stupid. Stay in school.”

If she has children, Beltran will try to do for them what O’Cadiz has done for her. “It’s a perfect way to raise kids,” she said. “You have to have rules.”

Children in Foster Care

The number of Orange County children in foster care has been declining slightly over the past three years as a reult of concerted efforts to preserve families or move children more quickly into permanent situations.

Latino Needs

Foster care authorities say that while the number of children in care has decreased, there is a pressing need for Latino foster homes. Latinos now make up 32% of foster children but just 12% of the homes. Foster Children, 1992

White: 55%

Latino: 32%

Black: 9%

Other Asian: 1%

Vietnamese: 1%

Unknown: 2%

Existing Foster Homes, 1992

White: 82%

Latino: 12%

Black: 6%

Source: Foster Care Information System, Sacramento