Sometimes Training Helps Make a Good Parent

Here’s how dumb I am:

When I was little, I thought those fairy tales about cruel parents and stepparents--Snow White’s stepmom ordering her heart cut out, Hansel and Gretel’s dad deliberately losing them in the woods--were just scary fiction.

Me and my Pollyanna childhood: My parents were good at the mother-and-dad job, and I just figured it came naturally, with the hormones. Not until I went off to college did I learn otherwise, from kids my age. I heard about cruel parents and drunk parents, neglectful and resentful parents, and parents who just up and left.

The shock of that has worn off, but not altogether. You can play paper-scissors-rock variants all you want--one good parent is better than two bad ones, a good gay parent is better than a bad straight one, two good ones are better than one--but it always comes back to this: You want good, happy, productive kids? Help to make good, happy, productive parents.

At your house, Tuesday night could be laundry night or “Frasier” night or telenovela night, but at the Hollywood Wilshire YMCA, it’s “family unity night.”

Christine Martinez works with Childrens Hospital on this parenting program, bolstered by the LA Bridges gang prevention program and staged in the broad embrace of the Y. The Valley Family Center in San Fernando runs parenting classes. So does the L.A. County Jail. In Fullerton’s “poverty belt,” the services equivalent of a bookmobile goes neighborhood to neighborhood with such programs.

Some people at the Y on Tuesday night became parents before they became adults, before they had a clue about how to manage their own lives, much less a child’s. Some have been ordered to attend this program, but a lot come for the same reason anyone goes to any class: How the heck do I do this better?

Ten women and one man, all Spanish-speaking, sit at a table. Last week they had to write down something they were thankful for about their kids, and their kids did the same, and there was a lot of happy crying. This week it’s about anger. Martinez switches on the VCR and asks them to watch the cartoon for anger “hot buttons.” Martinez and her fiance--the Y’s executive director, Mark Dengler--spent hours screening cartoons to find the right one.

There’s Elmer Fudd, in pursuit of a good night’s sleep against the caterwaulings of Sylvester, bringing out the cartoon arsenal: a book, a brick, a shotgun and, at last, dynamite. He blows the cat and himself to high heaven. Moral: Anger hurts you as much as it does those around you.

Martinez scrawls on her flip chart four kinds of anger, from “volcanic” to “sleeping lion,” and goes around the table: “What kind are you?”

Leticia is a sleeping lion: “I have a lot of patience, but after weeks when I see nothing’s been done, I explode.” Martha’s son, the 17-year-old, has been volcanically angry “since he was a baby--so angry that he can’t even speak.” Silvia doesn’t get mad fast, but when she does--”I don’t like to hit [the children], but they say bad words and I cry. How can I talk to them?”

Save that for next time, says Martinez. “We have to learn to regain that control of your kids so you don’t have to go on and on until you explode.”

This is called “family unity night” because later, upstairs in this fine building that architect Paul Williams designed 75 years ago, mothers and children will do anger exercises, listening to scenarios--a kid steals your lunch, a car splashes you with rainwater--and rating their anger on an outsized thermometer. After each exercise, there’s a Hershey’s Kiss reward, as if the sugar can sweeten the taste of fury right out of their mouths.

Eleven months a year, it’s “Oh, the terrible kids, the wayward kids, the Columbine-in-training kids,” and then, come the 12th month--this month--we push a different button on the jukebox and out comes another song: “Oh, the poor kids, the deprived kids, let’s help.”

So we spring for a doll or a skateboard or a turkey dinner, or 10 dolls, 10 skateboards, 10 turkey dinners, and go off feeling as benevolent as Bill Gates.

But what does that accomplish for the other 11 months? For the kid who asks Santa for his own bed, so he doesn’t have to share with his brothers? To make dad stop hitting mom? Or to make dad stop hitting him?

The best gift a child can have can’t be wrapped up in bright paper. It’s having as fine a set of parents, or parent, as can be had. Not rich. Not powerful or famous. But fine--a good role model, conscientious, loving, thoughtful.

It doesn’t have to be your child for you to help make it so. Do something that makes this one generous month do the heavy lifting of the other 11. Call it an interest-bearing account.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Monday and Wednesday. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.

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