Helping Girls Become Women : Social services: For 100 years, Crittenton Center has taken in teen-agers who are pregnant, abused or troubled.

The reunion of Sharon, Patty and Ivey on Sunday after nearly 10 years echoed through the halls of the Crittenton Center for Young Women and Infants with laughter and talk of the old times.

“I didn’t know you were still working here,” former resident Patty Criss, 25, said to her one-time counselor, Ivey Whitehead. “How are the girls now? They look so much older than we did.”

“Different faces, but the same problems,” responded Whitehead with a knowing smile to Criss and Sharon Santoro, 25, who, for a brief, bittersweet time, had also called the center home.

More than 100 former and current residents and their children gathered Sunday to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Crittenton facility in the Lincoln Heights area of Los Angeles’ Eastside. The center is a nonprofit residential treatment facility that provides educational and vocational training for teen-age girls who are pregnant, abused or troubled, and for young mothers with babies.

Executive director Sharrell Blakeley concurred with Whitehead’s assessment: Across the span of a century, young women, for the most part, keep having babies out of wedlock for the same reasons.

“These are girls who, in their own homes, have never received the love or attention they require,” she said over the din of excited greetings, scampering youngsters and a three-piece band that entertained in one of the halls. “The problems are only exacerbated now because families are more dysfunctional. Drugs are rampant and there is more abuse.”

In 1892, when the Los Angeles center opened, it was more a traditional maternity home, where young women “who erred” arrived with their parents, wore white gloves at the piano and settled into a discreet anonymity until they could be reintroduced into polite society. Then, nearly all of the young women surrendered their children for adoption. Today, nearly all of the girls who pass through Crittenton keep their babies, and virtually all are referred by juvenile courts.

The young women are taught not only the practical skills of parenting such as diapering and feeding, but the harder lessons as well.

“To a girl they say, ‘I had this baby to have someone to love me,’ but we try to teach them that babies don’t give, they take,” said Blakeley. “The problem is they put their needs before the child’s and they have to unlearn that.”

Blakeley said she finds satisfaction in the growing realization among social scientists of the importance of parenting skills and other lessons learned at facilities such as Crittenton.

“When you see older people carrying around teddy bears to try to reclaim their childhood, then you realize how significant that childhood was,” she said. “Self-esteem and self-worth are difficult things to define but they definitely are the key to good parenting.”

Angelica Urias would agree. She was 15, scared and eight months pregnant with her son Charlie--now a strapping, handsome 11-year-old--when she arrived at Crittenton.

“They were there day and night for me,” said Urias, now 27 and happily married. “When I went into labor, they went to the hospital with me. They taught me how to take care of my son when I had no idea what to do. And they showed him so much love that I felt that and carried it over to him myself. I don’t know how I would have turned out if it hadn’t been for this place.”