Officials Exhort O.C. Parents to Do Their Duty

Local officials said Thursday it could take more than a generation for Orange County to see significant improvement in the welfare of its children, who are now caught in a troubling cycle of crime, poverty, abuse and ill health as detailed in a new county report.

Responding to startling increases in teen pregnancies and serious juvenile crime, officials Thursday urged families to pull together or risk an even more serious level of decline.

“This is a wake-up call for all of Orange County,” said Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, who initiated the two-year study of the condition of Orange County children. It is to become an annual report.

Vasquez said local government would attempt to address the glaring deficiencies outlined in the report, but he said it was time for parents--not government--to take charge of their families.

Although officials pledged to redirect dwindling resources to problem areas, the report offered little in the way of remedies.

“The common thread in all of the these findings is that parents must assume a greater responsibility for their children,” Vasquez said. “It is not the government’s responsibility to raise children. It is the responsibility of parents.”

The call for a return to traditional family values was repeated over and over Thursday by social service workers, probation officers and health officials, many of whom joined Vasquez at a news conference to discuss the report.

For example, John F. Dean, superintendent of Orange County schools, called on parents to devote at least 15 minutes of their day exclusively to their children.

Dean, lamenting that class sizes in Orange County allowed for little individualized instruction, advised parents to “turn off the idiot box” and spend time talking to their children.

Given the general affluence of Orange County, County Social Services Director Larry Leaman said local residents have long and mistakenly believed that their children would somehow be shielded from serious societal troubles.

“There has been a sense of denial in parts of Orange County, but denial is slowly melting away,” Leaman said. “We have a generation of youth in trouble and their numbers are unprecedented.”

For Leaman, no other barometer of Orange County’s youth troubles is more emblematic than the statistics showing dramatic increases in births to teen-age mothers.

Between 1988 and 1991, the report found that births to teens increased by more than 34%, well above the rate of increase in all of California. The study also found that Latinos accounted for 70% of all teen births during the same four-year period.

But even more surprising, Leaman said, was that for some teen mothers the pregnancies were not accidental.

“To them, it is the only way to find a family life, to find love, and it is sometimes a way to make a man happy,” Leaman said. “That’s a reality in our society that people really haven’t heard of.”

That quest for acceptance has also driven local children--again in unprecedented numbers--to join violent gangs and participate in serious crimes, another troubling trend found in the county report.

Coupled with poverty rates that now ensnare more than 65,000 local children, according to the report, the portrait of local children offers little in the way of encouragement.

Much of the information in the report was drawn from existing databases kept by various county agencies. In many cases, the information was not new but, taken together, the report represents one of the most comprehensive evaluations of local child life.

“Some of these trends are going to take a generation or more to turn around,” said Stephanie Lewis, the county’s chief deputy probation officer.

But in one hopeful development, officials said Orange County has begun in recent months to see a leveling in the numbers of juveniles charged with serious crimes after years of steady increase.

Colleene E. Hodges of the county’s Gang Violence Suppression Unit said that during the past four years Orange County had seen a 49% increase in the number of juveniles arrested for serious felony crimes such as murder, rape, robbery and assault.

The report showed that juvenile arrests involving weapon offenses in Orange County jumped by nearly 30% in the past four years.

Supervisor William G. Steiner, former director of the Orangewood Foundation and leading advocate for local and national children’s programs, described the county report as perhaps the most complete analysis of youth affairs.

“It confirms what I’ve been saying for a long time,” Steiner said. “The well-being of children is in jeopardy. Most of us believe that we are in real danger of losing an entire generation.”

Steiner said more attention should be paid to the changing demographics of the county which, according to the report, has left minority children in more desperate positions than their white counterparts.

Although the overall poor condition of minority children was consistent with findings throughout the nation, Steiner said the influx of new immigrants in a weakened economy has contributed to declines in child health and in other areas.

Steiner recommended continued and stronger attempts at outreach to respond to the changes in local population.