Taking Parenting a Step at a Time : Education: At L.A. adult occupational center, young mothers celebrate the learning of skills and lessening the violence against their children.

They’re teen-agers, they’re mothers, they’re high school dropouts, they’re poor. In their lives there are few accomplishments without great struggle and even fewer celebrations.

So when most of the 30 young mothers enrolled in the Business Industry School’s Teen Parenting and Child Care Program gathered Friday in the toy-filled, brightly colored room where they usually bare their souls, the occasion was festive if not downright momentous.

They had successfully gotten through the week without hitting their children. For the most part.

“No Punishment Week” was the culmination of two months of learning parenting skills and alternatives to what Director Ruth Beaglehole considers forms of violence against children: smacking, hair-pulling, name-calling or verbal humiliation.

The mothers come to the Mid-City school--one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s adult occupational centers--with toddlers in tow and hopes of finally earning high school diplomas. Parenting is part of the curriculum.

Sitting in a large circle on tiny chairs, the young women with faces of girls, some with their children, were praised by Beaglehole and given ornately scripted certificates of recognition from Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg.

“This is a stupendous week!” exclaimed Beaglehole, who is counselor and confessor to the group. “I want to congratulate you for a week of no hitting, no violence.”

Beaglehole stood in the middle of the circle and singled out mothers with a call to stand up.

“Antonia, you did it, woman!” Beaglehole said. “What do you want to say?”

“That I gave him no violence,” Antonia said.

*

Beaglehole turned to the group of mothers and visitors.

“Did you hear that, everyone? She gave her son no violence! Do you feel proud?”

The group applauded.

She moved on to another mother, asking her how she wrestled with the urge to hit. “Was it hard?”

“Very hard,” said the girl.

“Did you hear that?” Beaglehole commanded of the room. “We need to give witness. It was very hard. What was the hardest? . . . Not having patience?”

“Not having patience,” the young mother responded immediately.

Their voices were low, their grins were sheepish. It is not like that during the two-hour counseling sessions that the 51-year-old Beaglehole conducts each day. There, the mothers bring their anger and frustration and their honesty.

“They walk in and say, ‘I hit last night,’ ” said Beaglehole, a longtime Los Angeles resident who was born in New Zealand. “There’s no judgment here. The message is: Just keep trying.”

Preparing for a week of nonviolence, the mothers last week held what they called a “forgiving ceremony,” symbolically washing their hands of violence in a large tub of water filled with white flower petals.

But by the following Monday they were complaining about what they were doing, wondering out loud why they had undertaken the challenge. On Friday, they took account of their successes and failed attempts. Plastered on the walls around them were warnings, admonitions and inspirations not to hit. “Realize How Old I Am,” read one in painted block letters.

Beaglehole’s arm encircled the shoulders of a young mother who takes numerous buses to the school. The teen-ager was asked how often she had hit her child.

“It was less,” the girl answered quietly.

“Less! Less! “ exclaimed Beaglehole. “That’s a beautiful thing to accomplish.”

This is not child abuse as it’s normally defined. “I don’t think we’ve reported any of these mothers,” said Beaglehole, who by state law is obligated to report child abuse and has done so in the past.

*

Beaglehole believes that hitting your child as a form of discipline--even if it doesn’t hurt--ought to be as unacceptable as a man striking a woman or people beating their dogs. “I’m worried about the (progression) of hitting on hands to child abuse,” said Beaglehole, who has three children, ages 17, 20, 22--the oldest of whom she admits having hit once or twice. But she insists she has lived by what she preaches.

“I don’t want this to be a stereotype of this group of people,” she added. “I’m not doing this because they’re a more abusive population. . . . It’s not a poor people’s problem. It’s a societal problem.”

The ceremony ended with the distribution of flowers, as the teen-agers repaired to another room for ice cream and conversation.

“I never hit my kids, but I hurt them emotionally with my words--I think that’s worse,” 20-year-old Elsa Aguilar, the mother of a 5-year-old girl and a 15-month-old boy, said as she fingered the petals of her flower. She had recounted before the group how Jesse had tested her patience by turning the television on and off more than a dozen times as she repeatedly told him to stop.

“Ruth told me he’s just knowing he has the power to make all these lights appear and disappear by touching these buttons,” she said. “I thought he was just being a brat.”

Aguilar struggles to take care of her children and keep up with the school work she has now. “I have a lot, a lot of problems,” Aguilar said as she headed with Jesse for ice cream. “Like right now, I’m not in the mood for this. I’ve got a lot of things on my mind.”

Marta Molina, 19, hit her 2 1/2-year-old son David on Monday. “On the butt,” she admitted, recalling how he balked as she put him in his car seat. “Sometimes it’s just too much. I give him to someone else--my mom, my grandma.”

She made it through the rest of the week fairly violence-free. “I just talked to him more instead of yelling at him. . . . I don’t want to hit him,” she said. “I don’t want to raise him like my mom raised me. . . . She would hit me and I would laugh--I guess to make her angry.”

It is not quite the same when Molina hits her son.

“He cries,” she said.