A City Practices What It Preaches
It’s been our roughest morning yet as we continue on this summer-long look at the state of the American family.
The state of our family could be better: 12-year-old Ashley’s ear infection has pushed her to simpering. My wife, Pam, is trying to reach Dr. Thistlewaite back in California on the cell phone, but we’re in one of those spots where attitudinal operators demand credit card numbers as a scratchy signal fades.
We’re lost. We’re late. And my vibrating pager gives my waist shock treatment as an editor pesters me for a story from 2,500 miles away.
When Robert, 7, and Emily, 10, take to poking each other in the back of the RV, Pam and I do what every unofficial parenting guide recommends: We bicker. Once, back in Los Angeles, a similar moment led me to a minor epiphany:
We’d been driving along after a hard day of work and school and sports and lessons. Beat, grumpy and overwhelmed, we worried aloud about money, the kids’ educations (primary, secondary, post-graduate) and the insistent decomposition of our house. Then we passed a large family staring forlornly into the obviously diseased engine of a rust-and-primer sedan.
Had our car broken down at that moment, it would have sent hard shock waves through our family structure. And we’re bolstered by every advantage. For parents who work for minimum wage, or have troubled children, or an errant partner, or addictions worse than caffeine and hot sauce, every minor travail must reverberate with potentially disastrous intensity.
I think of that again when we finally reach Hampton, and Debbie Russell and her crew surround me and start rat-a-tatting off facts about this town’s acclaimed mission to help families.
Here’s one of the first tidbits to stick to my frazzled cortex: Parents who sign up for some of Hampton’s programs not only get advice. They also get free dinners from Red Lobster.
Russell, manager of the city’s Healthy Families Partnership, uses the children’s story “Stone Soup” to explain.
In the late 1980s, with the economy in a mess and government at every level cutting support for social programs, Hampton’s City Council made the seemingly delusional declaration that it would transform itself into the most livable city in Virginia.
They decided that the only way a city can sustain itself in the long run is by preventing the sort of problems that drain resources--family-related problems, for the most part. Keen on prevention, the state and federal governments came up with more than $1 million in grants.
Hampton wasn’t the only city with a program like this, but few cities if any pursued the idea with as much enthusiasm. Like the fabled village in “Stone Soup” that put out a pot of broth and let everyone who came by toss in an ingredient, Hampton made its declaration, and every school, agency and business in town was expected to contribute. “Our vision is very simple,” Russell says, “but it requires everyone’s participation to make it happen.”
In Hampton now, women are offered focused assistance from the moment they become pregnant, says Angie Russ, a supervisor for the Healthy Starts part of the project.
Families who seek assistance, at the urging of social workers or on their own, complete a “family stress check list” exploring their history and attitudes. A qualifying score entitles them to everything from nutrition and parenting classes to home visits by trained workers who never have more than 25 cases at a time, far fewer than the average social worker in most places.
After a child is born, parents are invited into a supportive network of programs.
And the programs aren’t just for poor families, or dysfunctional families. They’re for anyone who wants to be a better parent. As Russell makes clear, a two-engineer-income doesn’t guarantee that parents grew up in an environment that taught good family building skills; an ability to pilot a sophisticated market analysis doesn’t mean one effectively can channel the energies of a squalling child.
Carolyn Fair, who educates parents, says there are more than a dozen parent-education classes being taught at any given time, from “Raising Children in Troubled Times” to a class for the increasing numbers of grandmas and grandpas who wind up raising grandchildren orphaned by addiction or incarceration.
Healthy Families backs up its projects with newsletters and referrals, and Hampton’s libraries have opened special parenting sections where people can check out the materials they’ve encountered in their classes.
There are now about 5,000 families participating, and the project’s demonstrable success in decreasing abuse and teen pregnancy, for instance, is sufficiently impressive that the initial state and federal grants have become magnets for other funders, including local businesses, Russell says.
“We look at this from an economic perspective,” she says. “We tell employers that these are the parents who are raising their workers.”
With that in mind, businesses are adding their own innovations to the soup. For instance, several restaurants, from Red Lobster to Taco Bell, regularly contribute meals for Healthy Families to serve at evening classes, greatly increasing the odds that harried parents will attend, Russell says.
I contacted Russell after Sesame Street Parent magazine declared Hampton “The Most Family Friendly City in America.” Since then, Hollywood director Rob Reiner increased the city’s profile by focusing an ABC television special, “I Am Your Child,” on Hampton’s accomplishments.
As it happens, Hampton is the oldest continuously inhabited English-speaking community in the United States (nearby Jamestown crashed and burned, you’ll recall). So it seems fitting that the people here would be among the first to shake off America’s urban stupor and apply themselves with settlers’ zeal to salvaging society’s fundamental structure.
How hopeful should we be, though?
Some discussion occurs at an impressive Healthy Families school site, where the program’s classes are conducted in living room-like settings while offspring play in rooms fully stocked with the paraphernalia of childhood. (As Russell and I talk, her son Alec, 6, snaps red, white, blue and yellow Legos into an imaginative interpretation of our RV.)
We also talk in Healthy Family’s headquarters--where Alec peppers Emily with questions that turn her face pink:
“Are you married?”
Disdainful eye roll.
“Do you have a boyfriend? I have a girlfriend. I kissed her. Are you ready to get married?”
Mostly, though, we talk at the Virginia Air and Space Center, where Russell thoughtfully has arranged for the kids to take a tour during our meeting.
The official center for NASA’s Langley Research Center, this place is as impressive as Cape Canaveral, which we visited on our pass through Florida. Nineteen aircraft and spacecraft dangle from the 94-foot ceiling of the glass-and-steel structure. We’re awed by the tremendous skill and ingenuity that it took to hang these creations, let alone to build them and make them fly.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that such a display of excellence raises the cliched “if we can put a man on the moon” question.
Given the complexity of human nature and the vagaries of societal commitment, which is the tougher transition: From building with Legos to creating a spaceship, or from gawky grade-school flirtations to constructing a solid family?
* Thursday: A bicoastal co-op.
