Help With Home Work : Program for Black Families Teaches Abusive Parents How to Be Loving Ones

Whenever Dorothy Gordon felt depressed and unloved, she had a baby. Her loneliness ultimately yielded three sons. When they were infants, she cuddled them. When they were toddlers, she slapped them. And when they grew to be little boys, she punished them for all the times she had been wronged by all the other men in her life.

When the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services determined nearly two years ago that Gordon was mistreating her children, it looked as though her sons would go the way of one of every 17 black children in Los Angeles County: placement in a foster home.

But instead of taking her children from her, the county taught Gordon how to be a mother, how to turn a little piece of meat and a can of peas into a meal, how to hug her sons the way her mother never hugged her.

On Thursday, Gordon stood before the second graduating class of the Black Family Investment Project, a symbol of success in an innovative program that appears to be breaking the cycle of abuse in Los Angeles County’s black community.

About 250 families have been treated by the project since it was created three years ago on the theory that it is better to educate the parent than remove the child. According to department statistics, 87% of those families remained together a year after therapy. No further incidents of child mistreatment were reported.

“I used to slap my kids up the side of the head and tell them to get away from me. . . . Now I know the worst thing you can do to a black male child is slap him in the face,” said Gordon, who graduated with the first class a year ago. “If it wasn’t for this program, somebody else would have my kids and I would be in my grave.”

The stories of the 38 graduates Gordon addressed at an emotional ceremony in a Natural History Museum auditorium were much the same--the children of bad parents who grew up to be bad parents because that was the only kind of parent they knew how to be.

The pilot program, one of the few in the nation to focus on the troubled urban black family, is breaking a 100-year-old tradition that children should be rescued from the parents who mistreat them, said project director Saundra Turner-Settle.

The six-month curriculum includes three hours of parenting classes a week, lessons in make-up and wardrobe to improve self-esteem, field trips to amusement parks, cooking lessons, and lectures on discipline and patience. Social workers literally teach parents to put their arms around their children.

The idea is to reform a child-protection system that has failed by most accounts. About 350,000 children in the county have been placed in the care of someone other than their parents. The county spends $16 million a month on foster care, officials said. Most children taken from their parents are never returned and the parents, still unlearned in the science of child-rearing, are left to bear more children.

A disproportionate number of the county’s children in protective care are black, project officials said. While black children account for only 15% of all children in the county, they make up 44% of those under the county’s protective care, statistics show.

The family preservation project, still considered a pilot, was tailored to the needs of the black family sometimes beset by unemployment, substance abuse and the hardship of single-parenting.

“Often children are taken from their parents because no other resources are available to work with the parent around the problem,” Turner-Settle said. “Often children are taken from their parents because poverty is confused with neglect.”

So promising is the project’s success that it is one of the few programs to have its funding increased despite massive cuts dictated by this year’s state budget, officials said.

At Thursday’s ceremony, the results indeed seemed impressive.

Seventeen-year-old Robert Webb wrapped his arms around his graduating mother and handed her a rose. Six months ago, life in his Compton home was hell.

“No money. No food. A lot of mistreatment. She would leave us alone late at night. I would feel real bad,” said Robert, a Jordan High School senior. “Now? Life is perfect as perfect can get. She hugs me all the time.”