Teaching Mom and Dad How to Parent

The problem with babies is that they come without operating instructions. But what nature has mysteriously omitted, politicians and government officials increasingly are trying to provide.

From Los Angeles to Boston, states and local communities are scrambling to teach new parents the skills--from diapering to discipline--that many say they lack when a newborn arrives home.

So far, 25 states have adopted “parenting” programs that bring with them comfort and controversy. California is not among them, although Proposition 10 on the November ballot would hike state cigarette taxes by 50 cents a pack to help fund parent education as well as child development programs.

In Georgia, Democratic Gov. Zell Miller has arranged to give all new moms and dads a classical music CD or tape to play to their newborns. Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Roy Romer has created an army of welcome wagon-style volunteers to deliver gifts and information to new parents.

Under former Republican Gov. William F. Weld in Massachusetts, nurses and trained social workers began educational home-visits to teen mothers even before their babies were born, instructing them on what their children will need to grow and develop and how to steer clear of neglectful or abusive treatment. And in Texas, a program of parent education is tailored to the needs and culture of Latinos.

The initiatives have been inspired by new brain research demonstrating that children’s intellectual growth can be irreversibly stunted without adequate stimulation in the early years and by studies showing that a child’s relationship with parents has a lifelong effect on physical, intellectual and social well-being.

Many states are also investing in parenting classes as a way to break the cycle of welfare dependence. By inculcating good child-rearing skills in parents--especially those at greatest risk of welfare dependence, such as teenage and low-income parents--many state officials hope that they can bolster the family and inoculate the children against such factors as school failure, domestic violence and early pregnancy that could later land them on the dole.

The efforts are not universally acclaimed. Some conservatives distrust the idea of state-sponsored instruction on such controversial issues as spanking, seeing it as a curb on parental authority. And some minority community activists chafe at programs that they see as thrusting middle-class values on populations with their own traditions or that face a daily struggle just to get by.

The resulting exchange strikes at the heart of Americans’ most personal decisions and most private insecurities: What is good parenting, anyway, and can it be learned? Should all parents get the program, or in a world of limited resources, should the neediest alone have access? Finally, who gets to define what good parenting is?

“Sometimes I find that just the word ‘parenting’ is something [parents] don’t like,” said Delores Fuller, who leads group classes and conducts home visits for the nation’s oldest and most broad-based parenting program, Minnesota’s Early Childhood Family Education, or ECFE. “They get offended, feeling like you’re judging, that they don’t know, that they don’t have good ideas.”

Fuller, a mother of three, knows how that feels. A dozen years ago, when she arrived in St. Paul’s low-income and ethnically diverse Frogtown neighborhood, she went looking for a preschool program for her young son and was invited to join a parenting class. She attended grudgingly at first, keeping her mouth closed and her arms folded.

Before long, Fuller said, she was drawn in by the camaraderie of other parents. “I started feeling connected.” As her confidence grew, she began speaking up and found that fellow parents appreciated her observations. At home, Fuller found that the weekly exchange of perspectives was making her a more thoughtful, more encouraging parent--with more thoughtful and responsive kids.

“I started for him,” she said, referring to her son, Desean, who is now 15. “But it ended up being for me.”

Program Choices Cover All the Bases

The 25-year-old ECFE program is offered to every parent in the state who has a child younger than 5. And for all but a small handful who are referred by family court judges to the program, participation is strictly voluntary. Available in each of the state’s 350 school districts and in four tribal schools, the program teaches new parents everything from how to stimulate babies’ brain growth with books and games to how to recognize signs of delayed development or make toddlers behave. There are classes for dads, for families who speak only Spanish, for hearing-impaired parents, for gay and lesbian families. There are programs for first-time parents, reading lessons for those about to start school and home visits for those who cannot get away.

In some neighborhoods, storefront “drop-in” centers offer English-as-a-second-language classes, along with songs and play and the company of other parents. The program also acts as a gateway to other help, such as substance-abuse programs, housing assistance and shelter from domestic abuse.

To many researchers, the jury is still out on whether ECFE is effective. But for many participants, DonnaSue Flanders’ assessment seems to hit the mark: “It’s a lifesaver.”

Flanders, 33, was raised in a middle-class suburb outside St. Paul. But she has cut ties to her family, in which she says violent abuse was the norm. When her 3-year-old daughter, HaileySue, was born, she wanted something better for her own child.

But delivering on that hope has been difficult. Flanders is married to a man with steep child-support commitments and family income hovers just above poverty level. She said that living in Frogtown, her current home, has provoked “total fear and terror.” By night, she hears gunshots. And during the day, she sees drug dealers as she strolls with her daughter.

During a walk several months after the baby’s birth, Flanders happened upon a storefront ECFE facility called the Frogtown Family Resource Center. Its brightly painted windows promised toys, games, books, snacks and music for children. To parents, they offered information, advice and classes. Inside, nobody asked for proof of eligibility. Mother and daughter were drawn in and have kept coming back.

“I was getting into a real deep depression [because] I was so isolated,” said Flanders recently, as she watched her energetic daughter expertly assemble the pieces of a wooden puzzle. “When they offered me the parenting class, I was almost lost. There were times when I’d come and say: ‘I really want to get physical. Can’t I slap her into obedience?’ I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t have brought a child into the world.”

In addition to training, the Frogtown Center has provided Flanders a circle of friends that exchanges baby-sitting favors, outgrown baby clothes and tips on which playgrounds are currently free of drugs and crime.

“We’ve intertwined like we would have if we’d all lived on the same block,” said Flanders. “Years ago, you could have gone to your mom or the neighborhood ladies for those things. But there isn’t that anymore.”

And it has given her patience.

When the 3-year-old initially resisted potty training, the ECFE staff helped persuade Flanders to back off and give her time. When HaileySue talks back or throws a tantrum, Flanders sees her daughter’s behavior as the normal testing of a youngster. But the ECFE staff also has helped her understand that, yes, she can expect her daughter to follow rules at this age.

“It kind of refocuses you. You say, ‘Oh! my child is not the biggest brat in the world!’ ” said Flanders. “The burden that’s been lifted has been unexplainable.”

Study Finds Program Raises Confidence

An independent assessment conducted by Mueller Associates of Minneapolis in 1994-95 found that ECFE significantly increased parents’ knowledge of child development and confidence in their child-rearing decisions.

But critics, especially social conservatives, dispute the value of such programs and charge that they amount to meddling by government in the lives and decisions of American families.

More than any single issue, the question of discipline--and the practice of spanking in particular--rallies opposition to parenting programs. Many critics fear that parent educators are stalking horses for overzealous child-protection agencies, bent on stamping out spanking and diluting parental authority.

“It’s a typical liberal do-gooder view of life: These people really do think they know better how to raise children than these dumb parents,” said conservative commentator Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum. “And they’re not just going for a group of pitiful people who need help. Their aim is to go for all children.”

Many minority communities also are suspicious of such programs. They too see overzealous child-welfare agencies bent on dominating their children or imposing middle-class values on them. And they see politicians and well-heeled suburbanites criticizing forms of parental authority that are widely accepted among many minority and immigrant communities.

“I have heard people say: ‘Those are white man’s rules.’ They really feel it doesn’t work,” said Fuller, the reluctant student in ECFE parenting classes who became one of the program’s instructors. Her African American clients, she noted, are often vehement defenders of “whuppin’.”

“I was one of those parents I’m talking about at first: ‘They don’t do what you say? Hit ‘em!’ Now I take it right back to the parents: What are we teaching our children? I constantly ask them that.”

ECFE teachers do offer parents a wide range of alternatives to hitting their children and so are often seen as anti-spanking. But administrators insist they provide options, not proscriptions. They also are quick to point out that the impulse to hit exists among all income levels and ethnic groups.

In a group of middle-class moms, 32-year-old Charlene Nelson acknowledged as much, drawing solemn nods of agreement from other mothers. She closed her eyes and intoned the sing-song words of a ditty she learned from her ECFE class: “Take a deep breath, count to five, till you feel all calm inside.”

Nelson, a member of an ECFE group in St. Paul’s middle-class Eastside neighborhood, called herself a person with “explosive anger.” She said her 2-year-old son, Dylan, is “high-spirited” and lately prone to tantrums and disobedience.

It’s an incendiary mix, and some days, Nelson said, it takes all the support she can get to keep her anger in check. After Dylan pitched a screaming fit in a store recently, she came home and immediately called one of her fellow ECFE moms for reassurance and reinforcement.

“The first thing that comes to your mind is to thrash out,” Nelson said. “But the class has taught you that you have choices. You can hit him, but you have alternatives, like stepping into the next room, getting yourself together and stepping back in again.”

In a similar vein, ECFE officials see the program as helping to assimilate immigrants from as far as Somalia and Laos. At a special ECFE class in Frogtown, an official of Minnesota’s Department of Child Protective Services, with help from a pair of translators, painstakingly laid out the state’s definition of child abuse for five new mothers from Mexico and a Hmong mother with six children.

As the young women passed around Francisca Ramirez’s 3-month-old for cuddles, they commiserated about the hardships of raising children far from their own mothers. And they praised the lessons they have learned at ECFE, including the American custom of removing a misbehaving child briefly to a quiet place to work out a tantrum or ponder an infraction.

“Now I use it,” says Marta Bonilla, a 24-year-old mother of two preschoolers of the practice known as “time-out,” or “a fuera.”

“It’s easier, and my children listen to me more.”

A Field Still ‘in Its Infancy’

Not everyone is convinced that the programs work--or that the research is conclusive. “What I see in the field is a number of studies that are quasi-experimental,” said David Olds, who in 1978 launched a small program of home visits to new parents in Elmira, N.Y. “The field is in its infancy when it comes to rigorous research.”

Olds’ program of intensive home visits teaches new and expectant parents, among a wide range of skills, how to interpret and respond to their babies’ cries, to recognize developmental delays and, more simply, how to play with children. It has been replicated in Memphis, Tenn., and Denver. Under a Justice Department crime-prevention grant, the model Olds pioneered in upstate New York has been extended to 14 low-income communities. One of them--the “Esperanza” program, administered by the Los Angeles County Health Department--operates out of the Hope Street Family Center in the Pico-Union neighborhood.

Olds’ approach to parent education underscores a deep divide within the community of experts over which parents are most likely to benefit from such special support and whether public funds should be used to teach all parents or just some of them. Minnesota’s program is open to all parents of preschoolers. But most of the newest initiatives elsewhere are offered only to low-income parents, who are seen as needing extra support in their role as nurturers.

But when poor people are the only ones to get parenting programs, politically explosive questions arise: Do poor people make poor parents, more prone to abuse and neglect their children? And are their kids more likely to fail at school, commit crimes, become pregnant as teens or turn to welfare?

The plain fact, Olds said, is that most of the social ills parenting programs are designed to reduce are more prevalent in poor families.

Olds warned that “universal access” programs like Minnesota’s are not likely to provide the same “bang for the buck” as parenting programs that are targeted to needier families. When funds are scarce, the universal access initiatives tend to spread a thin layer of services over great numbers of people, Olds said. And the best-equipped parents, whose children are likely to be fine anyway, soak up scarce funding.

In the end, the big question is one that both politicians and researchers in time will have to answer: Do parenting programs work? Are the children of Minnesota, Garrison Keillor’s fabled land of Lake Wobegon, really “all above average?” And does the state’s long-running experiment in parental training make them that way?

Flanders thinks that she is a happier, better mother and that HaileySue is a more promising child because of ECFE. But she acknowledges, as most researchers do, that it’s not a direct connection.

With or without ECFE, Flanders said, her 3-year-old daughter probably was destined to be smart. But when it is a daily struggle to connect with a sad and confused mother, even a bright child could expend much of her wattage.

Instead, HaileySue is a sociable child with an uncommon memory for names and faces, a child who will learn anything presented to her in song. As she expertly snaps together the final piece of a puzzle, she swings around to her watching mother, sure of the praise to come. And so it does.

“Good job!” says DonnaSue, sharing her child’s triumph.

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BABY’S FIRST YEAR: From the loss of sleep to changes in relationships: a guide for new parents. S1