Love Is the Answer at Sheriff’s Class on Parenting

Resting his hand comfortably on his gun holster, the deputy looked out at the parents seated before him and talked about love. His partner, veteran Deputy Ed Tumbleson, encouraged the parents to join in.

“How do we as parents show our children we love them?” Tumbleson asked the parents gathered at the Conejo Community Park Community Center.

“Hug them,” shouted one mother.

“Kiss them,” offered another.

“Tell them that you love them,” said a father.

The 10 parents are enrolled in a 10-week, 30-hour course sponsored by the Thousand Oaks sheriff’s station designed to help them better control their teenage children.

Some are parents of runaways, referred by a parole officer after repeated brushes with the law.

Others are parents of juvenile delinquents.

Still others signed up just because they cannot control their headstrong, rebellious adolescents.

Known as the Parent Project, the program was developed by a retired police officer from Pasadena, a school administrator and a psychologist.

Over the 10 weeks, parents will learn how to control their unruly offspring, Tumbleson says.

They start by learning to express their love. Then they learn how to defuse an escalating argument. And finally they learn how to lay down the rules that will allow them to regain control of their households.

Each week there are homework assignments, to force parents to begin using those tools.

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The first week the parents had to tell their children once a day that they love them.

On a recent Wednesday night, the parents break up into small groups to discuss how it went.

At one table, a Thousand Oaks mother with a 17-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter went first.

“I did the I-love-yous,” she said. “I do that anyway, but I made a point of doing it every day. I went out and filled my son’s car with gas and told him, ‘Please don’t use up all the gas. I love you.’ ”

She said her children reacted with surprise.

A Camarillo father went next. Ron Lashley is divorced and does not live with his son.

“ ‘I love you’ is something you say to a woman friend, not someone bigger than you,” he began. “But his birthday is coming up, so I am thinking of getting him a card and writing ‘I love you’ on that. I’m thinking maybe that will break the ice.”

The idea, according to Tumbleson, is to give parents the tools to motivate their children to follow rules. That derives, at its most basic level, from love.

“We do things for our bosses because we get paid,” he explained. “We do things for our parents because we love and respect them.”

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After six weeks, Tumbleson and fellow Deputy Harold Hanley put the parents to work drawing up an action plan to change their child’s particular problem behavior--whether it be doing drugs, trolling with gangs or running away.

“The parents need three things,” Tumbleson said. “They need a desire to change their kid’s behavior, information about their kid and support groups--of other parents.”

The Thousand Oaks sheriff’s substation offered the first “Parent Project” course this past spring. Many of those parents were recruited from a forum sponsored by the substation’s gang detail.

That one was bilingual, and half the parents were Spanish-speaking. But Tumbleson said that although the Spanish-speaking parents soaked up the lessons, it was too difficult to conduct the classes in two languages.

This class, which started Sept. 14, is the third course, but there are more on the way.

Another deputy is planning to launch a course in Camarillo later this year, and the Thousand Oaks substation plans to offer a Spanish Parent Project soon.

On this particular night, parents earnestly jotted down notes as the deputies spoke.

Only two weeks into the course, they praised the content--with one divorced father calling his former wife and briefing her weekly over the phone.

“The kids didn’t come with a manual,” said Albert Monson, who attends the class with his wife. They have two daughters, 9 and 13, and were referred to the program by the Sheriff’s Department to help them gain the upper hand.

“It’s a really good idea,” he said. “They’ve taught a lot of stuff.”

A Thousand Oaks father who immigrated from Serbia 20 years ago is in the class because his daughter has run away more than 10 times in the last year. Part of the problem, he said, is that he is dealing with bringing up a daughter in a culture different from the one he knew.

“There are different rules over there,” he said. “Kids are very connected to the family. Family, schools, the law, they are all working together.”

Here, he said, kids do not have many consequences to deter bad behavior, and young people are constantly bombarded by a pop culture that does not encourage model conduct.

Parents who have completed the course say it works.

A divorced Thousand Oaks mother who enrolled in the first class last spring said the lessons she learned have helped her wrest control of her household back from her five strong-willed daughters.

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“My fear was, if the two oldest are doing this, I have three more watching me. What’s it going to be like in another eight years?” she said.

She said her daughters could sense the change in her.

“It got to the point where they hated to see me go to the parenting class,” she said. “They thought I was on a power trip or something.”

She said she learned to write down pager and phone numbers for all her daughters’ friends. When her 17-year-old was out after curfew, she would start running down her three-page list of numbers until she tracked her down.

She said she also believed she had a stronger connection to the Sheriff’s Department when something did go wrong.

One of the biggest challenges, Tumbleson said, is letting class members know they are not bad parents just because their kids sometimes get into trouble. Part of his job is to validate them, he said.

“I ask them, what did you do to create this strong-willed child?” he said. “And I tell them, you had sex. That’s all. A lot of their personalities are formed in the womb.”