Get a Grip

You don’t need a resume or references. There isn’t a battery of tests. There isn’t an interview process to identify those predisposed and those who should stay far, far away.

Seems crazy that for a job as important as this, says Shirlee Smith, so many people haven’t the faintest clue.

“My thing is,” says Smith with her “get real, girlfriend” grin, parents are “unlike owners of new cars or a refrigerator, who get a little paper that tells you how it’s going to function . . . and if it doesn’t, you get to take it back. . . .

“No such luck in this ballgame.”

Smith, 62, who had her first of six children at 19 (“Back then, that was getting up there!”), has had a lot of time and on-the-job training to roll parenting into not just a job but a high-profile career.

Since 1995, Smith (who also writes a column for the Pasadena Weekly) has been sharing her sage advice on the cable access show “Talk About Parenting” (airing in two dozen cities nationwide). If you didn’t get raised right, she’ll be the first to let you know--and to tell you how you can break the chain.

She’d only be speaking from experience. Smith has constantly re-imagined herself--from welfare mother to publicist, from part-time bank card center worker to public affairs radio show host, from stand-up comedian to foster mother--and has seen that life is an ever-changing series of scenes and circumstances.

On her show, Smith pulls from her past to tackle complex issues ranging from children in the court system to playing hooky to multicultural parenting. The show operates on a shoestring, with a spirited board of directors, an intern and a volunteer.

“People have no concept of the resources that are available to them. Or when an agency treats them badly that there is recourse,” she says. “People need to cause trouble.”

And she’s made causing trouble a full-time job: “Having children is not a haphazard thought. But people oftentimes put more into thinking about their wedding gown,” she says. “I found in raising children, you just had to have organization. It was the only way that I was going to survive. Because I became a single parent. . . . I divorced my husband, and the only way I was going to rule the roost--and I firmly believe that parents have to be head of the household--was that I had to have organization, and I had to understand who each of my children were, because they are not all the same and that was the only path that helped me survive.”

Traveling Life’s

Bumpy Road

Smith’s own path has been a wild blur of a ride. Her let’s-cut-to-the-chase persona isn’t veneer. One of her children was born clubfooted, and another died from sickle cell anemia “before we all even knew what that was.”

Separated from her husband at 30 with a household of daughters to feed and no clear career path, she had to think quickly--and creatively.

“I was a mother on welfare. And I love to emphasize that, because the public tends to believe that welfare people go nowhere,” says Smith, rearing back in her chair in her fan-cooled home office--a little annex off the main house in Altadena. “Well, my theory is that you can’t go nowhere if you have a track to get on.”

She enrolled in UCLA’s sociology program in 1967--tuition was a lot lower in those days--primarily to prove a point.

“Sociologists were always writing about the black family and how we were dysfunctional and how we have these broken homes,” she remembers. “This was outrageous to me. Notice that they don’t use that term anymore . . . now it’s ‘single head of household.’ Basically I took it upon myself to disprove the myth. The stereotype.”

She did so not simply in the classroom, but in her day-to-day existence--moving her way toward self-reliance by example.

“We grew up in Boyle Heights, and that was a very close-knit community. My mother had many friends, and one of them used to always take me grocery shopping with her. That’s how I learned to do a budget and a list. . . . There was a family who had 11 kids! Molly Murphy’s house was like a camp. She could tell you what Millard was doing at 4:15! They were organized.”

And so was Smith, attending class while most of her children were in school, but sometimes taking the youngest along in a baby buggy. Neighbors and friends were there to help too.

Smith finished with a degree, but the demands of her home life, her children’s health concerns, required that she divine a plan that would allow for a flexible schedule yet still put food on the table.

So she put her efforts into bread-and-butter public relations work and an array of public service endeavors that both satisfied her need to be a voice in the community and fed her soul.

And it was this in-the-thick-of-things path that led to a happenstance meeting with a Pasadena Star-News editor. She pitched him an idea for a column.

He asked for 10 samples. And she produced them.

“He told me, ‘I tell everyone who approaches me that,’ they never do it. I never expected them.’ ” And there she perched for 20 years, ruffling feathers, or so she hopes: “I say what I think a lot of people would like to say.” Last year, her column moved to the Weekly.

Making the

Right Contacts

The television show happened in much the same way: “I was sitting next to some Pasadena official at some luncheon, and I said: ‘You know what I’d like to do . . .’ ” Smith recalls. “It was from those experiences that I learned: It’s not what you do; it’s who can help you.”

The idea seemed obvious. “I mean, there are some real basic things that parents need help with--there are mothers who give their children Kool-Aid instead of milk. They just don’t know. Or that you shouldn’t take your kid out to a restaurant when they are tired. They do need a nap.” And more complex issues: “You are not your children’s friend. You are the parent. And I think parents don’t know, or have forgotten, how to say no.”

It’s that straight-talking hard line that has struck such a chord.

“She is like her column,” says Marina Tse, former State Board of Education member and chairwoman of the Chinese American Education Assn. “She writes from her kitchen, and it shows. It’s very warm. We need a lot more people like her . . . to teach people to ask the questions and bring out confidence.”

Adds Ricky Butler, who was a guest on the show a year ago: “We just didn’t know. We have a child with attention deficit disorder. And there was so much we just didn’t know about it, or the system. I learned about patience and that it was OK to ask questions that might sound stupid. Because if you ask, you can get answers that will help.”

“She had a couple of other families who had been through this with children’s services,” says Butler’s wife, June, “and we were beginning to talk about starting up a support group. . . . She’s very intelligent and very witty, but she’s also very concerned.”

But Smith is the first to say, “I’m not ‘Dear Shirlee’ . . . I’m not preaching to parents, but giving them food for thought.

“At first the show was just a ‘nice’ show, but then I started pressing things more. I just think it makes for a better show to have some disagreement. . . . People say, ‘That woman is so hostile!’ But all my children are college grads. So [they say], ‘She must be doing something right.’ ”

Perspective

on Parenting

For her daughter Peggy Lewis, 34, growing up was indeed a proving ground.

“She was beyond strict,” says Lewis, now married and a mother of two. “Strict isn’t the word. She was very inflexible. It was ‘My way or the highway,’ ” recalls Lewis, who was on her own by 19.

But the time that has passed since then has given her a broader perspective: “I think having kids of my own has made me think about what kind of mother I want to be. What I’ve taken away is the importance of being a strong presence in their endeavors, knowing what they are doing. Following through on the things that I say I’m going to do whether it is punishment or reward. Being a strong disciplinarian, but in a loving way. But [the] thing I won’t do is be so stoic. . . . I’m willing to listen, to be open and more flexible.”

And Lewis has seen her mother move into another chapter--as foster parent to an 8-year-old named Brandi.

“I think that the fact that she has one child in the household versus five makes a big difference, in terms of the mental space she has,” Lewis says. “She did it all [then]. . . . I think she’s able to now step back and look at it. And now I can see a softening to her.”

For her part, Smith is quick to underscore that parenting is a process.

“I just think people don’t understand the later consequences if they don’t intervene. Your job as a parent starts very early,” Smith says, “and I think that we’ve sort of lost some of that in our chase for the dollar.”

Smith sees every job--her column, public speaking, workshops--like a stage. It’s something she picked up in her days as an itinerant stand-up comic after the children were grown: “When you step on stage, it’s no different from life. You have a roomful of people with expectations, and in order to deliver--successfully--you have to have a sense of yourself. The joke that didn’t work tonight may work another night--but it’s also knowing when something isn’t working.”

Smith still has main-room aspirations. She’d like to see the TV show find its way into full national viewership. Until then, she’ll tend to her small parcel: “Everyone wants to regulate Hollywood, regulate guns. How about taking one little step in our own homes?

“Parenting is a job. And should be treated like a job. There’s no such thing as perfect parents or perfect children. We just need to get over it.”

And get to work.

* For information on “Talk About Parenting,” call (626) 794-8585.

* Lynell George can be reached by e-mail at lynell.george@latimes.com.