Teaching a Big Lesson --How to Be a Family

Lynn Hoff and her husband Travis will be spending Christmas with six adolescent girls who are earnestly trying to find some joy in the holiday season despite their years of hardship and sadness.

The girls will not have far to travel for the get-together--they live just down the hall.

The Hoffs are “family teachers” who live in one of five homes operated by Boys Town of Southern California on an isolated street that cuts through the wilderness of Trabuco Hills. It will be the young couple’s first Christmas with the girls, who range in age from 11 to 18.

“Most of them have never had a normal Christmas, have never had gifts. This whole experience for them is totally new. A lot of them never had a tree,” said Hoff, 25, who moved into the home with her husband last February. Before coming to Orange County, she had worked with emotionally disturbed children and juvenile offenders in Wisconsin for three years while completing a bachelor’s degree in special education.

“They’re excited and they’re really enthusiastic about decorating. A couple of the kids were out there stringing lights everywhere outside. One of them got a tree and everyone decorated. They’ve been wanting to decorate since Halloween, but I said, ‘Just hang on, let’s wait until it gets a little bit closer.’ ”

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It will be a bittersweet Christmas for Hoff, who is expecting the birth of her own child in a few weeks. While dedicated to her work and inspired by the progress of the girls, the job is more demanding than she expected.

Hoff and her husband are up most mornings at 5:15 to supervise household chores required of the girls before they go to school. Their daily duties end when the oldest girls, two 18-year-old high school seniors, go to bed at 10 p.m.

In between is the constant monitoring and assessment of behavior, trips to schools and stores, phone calls to teachers and “family meetings.” The Hoffs rarely take the weekend off.

“It was a real shock for us. The adjustment was hard. We went from having no kids and being in college to having six kids with emotional disturbances on top of that. It has been quite a lifestyle change,” she said. “We thought we’d have more time off when the kids were in school. But it’s not like that at all. There are meetings, phone calls, and there’s a ton of paperwork to do.

“This is not something we want to do forever. It’s especially difficult for us because we’re from Wisconsin and we have no family out here. It’s really difficult to make friends, because you usually make friends at work. We rely a lot on each other.”

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The Orange County Boys Town opened in May 1994 and has two homes for girls and three homes for boys, all on the same quiet residential street, cut off from the surrounding community. It is not the compound-style living that long characterized Boys Town, which was founded in 1917 by Father Edward J. Flanagan. The youths are usually sent to Boys Town by county social service agencies or the probation department. They are interviewed before they are accepted, to determine if they are likely to cooperate with the intricate system of rules they must follow.

“An extremely high percentage of these kids have been abused, neglected and abandoned. That’s definitely true in our house. They have real low self-esteem; they have a real hard time trusting people, especially adults. A lot of them have never lived with a couple; it’s usually been just a mom.

“We also have some kids on probation who have broken the law in some way and are now out of the home for that reason.”

The Hoffs gave Boys Town a two-year commitment, and as they near the completion of their first year, they say their surrogate parenting has had a positive effect.

“A large part of the job is role modeling and helping them to break that cycle of abuse. It’s good for them to see that Travis and I can disagree and not get violent with each other,” she said. “It’s something we think is really basic, but it’s not to them. It’s something they’ve never seen before.

“In a couple of cases, the bond between us and the children has been the thing that has kept them here, and kept them in line, because they are so eager to please. We want them to care about themselves, because if they don’t, once they get out of here they’re going to have problems.”

Hoff is encouraged that the Christmas season has become a season of caring for the girls who occupy so much of her life.

“Most of them really grew up with nothing. They’re so excited about getting something that’s brand new, all for them. They look under the tree and say, ‘Oh, there’s a present down there for me.’ This is probably the first time that they’ve really felt that they’re part of a normal family.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile: Lynn Hoff

Age: 25

Hometown: Boulder, Colo.

Residence: Trabuco Canyon

Family: Husband of two years, Travis

Education: Bachelor’s degree in special education from University of Wisconsin

Background: Three years as a counselor for emotionally disturbed children and juvenile offenders at Eau Claire Academy (Wisconsin); completing her first year as a “family teacher” for Boy’s Town of Southern California

On troubled youth: “Nine out of 10 times it’s the parents who are really having troubles and the kids are unfortunately the victims. You just really can’t write these kids off. The fault doesn’t always lie with them.”

Source: Lynn Hoff; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times