Off to a Good Start : Harbor City’s Unique Program Works With Children From Infancy

“Mommies, talk to the babies,” urges Rita Mayo, a small woman exuding sweetness and warmth like a mother hen.

“Talk while you feed the babies,” she says, coaxing terms of endearment from six mothers seated around a table, spooning Pablum into the mouths of their babies.

“She needs to be on a diet,” Mayo tells one mother whose baby is overweight. “You are fat,” she says, bending and playfully shaking the baby girl’s chubby leg.

Mayo is head teacher in the infant classroom at the Harbor City Parent Child Center, a Head Start program located next to the Normont Terrace housing development in Harbor City.

Serving both low-income mothers and children, the Head Start center is one of the oldest in the nation and the only Head Start program of its kind in Los Angeles County. Unlike typical Head Start programs, which concentrate largely on preparing 4-year-olds for school, the Parent Child Center works with children, and their families, from infancy to age 4.

The Harbor City center celebrates its 25th anniversary this week--in the same month that a national Head Start advisory committee is expected to announce recommendations for improving the federal preschool program founded nearly 30 years ago as part of the War on Poverty.

The committee’s recommendations urge more comprehensive programs such as Harbor City’s for poor children.

“The whole premise is that we work with the families from birth,” says Ray Hernandez, director of the Harbor City center, which serves 176 families and is under the auspices of the Volunteers of America of Los Angeles. “It’s really early intervention.”

Eighty percent of the children enrolled in the center are from families receiving public assistance. Most are Latino and speak little English.

Until recently, there were only 37 parent-child centers in the nation, but under growing awareness of the plight of poor children the number of centers has been increased to 106. They were started by Head Start in the late 1960s under former President Nixon and his advisers who acknowledged that poor children needed more than a dose of Head Start at the age of 4 if they were to compete academically with their peers.

Critics of Head Start have said that any positive effects the program has on poor children fade quickly as the youngsters enter school. Many Head Start supporters agree, but they argue that the program’s effect diminishes because the children need more intensive programs starting at the earliest possible age.

Lisbeth B. Schorr, a member of the Head Start advisory committee and a scholar and author who has written extensively on the program, says she believes there is support in Congress and among the public for increasing Head Start funds so it can work with even more young children.

“I think there’s more and more understanding of the need to invest in kids early,” Schorr says.

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Investing in kids early is exactly what Mayo is trying to teach the mothers when she scoops 5-month-old Mercedes Espinoza up into in the air, holds her close to her face and says, “Let’s talk. Can you talk? Can you and Rita talk?”

Mayo is demonstrating how good mothers learn to encourage their infants to carry on the conversations that child experts say are vital to human bonding and communication skills later in life.

Time and again, during the 2 1/2 hours she spends each day with different groups of mothers and babies, Mayo finds ways to encourage the mothers to stimulate their children.

At times, for example, all the babies are laid face down on the carpeted floor of the playroom.

With colorful objects placed before them, the babies wave their arms, often screech in delight and try to reach the objects. The older infants, once they’ve grasped the object, often roll over on their backs, waving the toy they’ve captured in the air above them.

The activity is intended to stimulate the babies’ curiosity and encourage them to reach out and move, Mayo explains.

Things that many mothers know instinctively or learn from a book are foreign to some of the mothers in her program, Mayo explains, pointing out that some of the women have to be taught to make frequent eye contact with their children.

When Mayo spots two mothers holding their babies facing outward during bottle feeding, Mayo encourages them to cradle the babies so they gaze at each other.

When she sees an underweight baby girl making little eye contact with her mother, Mayo wonders if the child has been exposed to drugs or is being underfed. She makes a note to refer the mother and baby to the center’s full-time nurse practitioner.

As the children grow older they are moved into nearby classrooms where nursery school programs are tailored to meet their developmental needs. All Head Start children at the center get health and dental services, with particular emphasis on childhood immunizations.

In the Head Start programs that serve only 4-year-olds, Mayo explains, younger siblings are not eligible for ancillary services such as dental care.

“Here,” she says, “they help the whole family.”

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In some cases, when families are in crisis, other services are required. Angela Soto knows that well. Soto, Mayo’s teaching assistant now, recalls when she first became a Head Start mother 10 years ago.

Estranged from her husband and on welfare, Soto received help from Head Start social workers who reunited the family and trained Soto as a teacher’s aide. Thanks to Head Start, she says, her children “didn’t have any problem with school.”

Mayo also began as a Head Start mother, then went to community college and took special courses for Head Start instructors in early childhood development.

Monica Espinoza, a mother in the infant class, says her family has received a range of services at the center. Her preschool son has received speech therapy and her preschool daughter, who was intensely shy and terrified of being separated from her mother, overcame her problems too.

Teachers and counselors, Espinoza said, worked with her and her daughter by separating them for as little as five minutes at a time until the child learned to trust that her mother would return.

Now, when Espinoza brings her daughter to her nursery school class, the little girl says, “Just sign me in. Go home. I don’t need you.”

The point is, Mayo says, the parent-child center is as good for the mothers as for the children.

“When the parents come here,” Mayo says, “they enjoy themselves, they’re happy. And when they go home, they’re happy and I guarantee they give that child more.”