Center Helps Children Deal With Painful Realities

There’s nothing visibly different about the children playing in the waiting room at the Community Family Guidance Center in Cerritos.

The two brothers playing board games and the girl puzzling over her math homework wouldn’t be out of place in any doctor’s or dentist’s office.

But the stories of the nearly 3,000 children the center serves are not like the stories of most children. The lives they describe to the counselors and psychologists give added significance to the donations the center solicits for the children in an annual holiday letter-writing campaign.

“When you take poverty, mental illness, child abuse and neglect, it doesn’t add up to a happy holiday,” said Patricia B. Kent, director of community relations at the center.

With programs for children “from birth to 18,” the center takes referrals from courts, probation officers, schools and mental-health agencies.

One program helps children recently discharged from mental-health facilities readjust to living with their families. Another offers counseling for those with substance abuse problems.

Two-thirds of the children who receive counseling have experienced some kind of neglect or physical or sexual abuse.

“A lot of these kids with backgrounds of abuse are more prone to drug abuse,” Kent said. “They self-medicate so they don’t have to face reality.”

Though the mission of the nonprofit center is to help children deal with reality, for one day of the year, after the gift drive, it’s OK to forget. A room normally used for group counseling is decked out in holiday trimmings, and families are invited to “shop” for donated toys.

For this year’s gift giveaway on Dec. 20, the toys won’t be wrapped, allowing parents to pick things appropriate to their children’s tastes, including gift certificates for hard-to-shop-for teens. “It’s just a way to empower the parents so they don’t have to feel like they’re picking up a gift for their child from someone else,” Kent said.

Kent remembers offering to help a family carry gifts to the car during last year’s drive, only to discover that the family had taken the bus because their car had broken down. She drove them home, and recalls how happy the children were with their toys. “The kids were just so thrilled to have something new. All children love toys, but it was an innocence you don’t see in children who are used to having things,” she said.

This season, as part of its annual holiday fund-raising drive, The Times is featuring organizations that serve disadvantaged families and children in Southern California. The Community Family Guidance Center received $10,000 from last year’s Times Holiday Campaign. It is one of more than 50 charities that shared in the $653,000 collected in that fund-raising effort.

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HOW TO GIVE

Donations (checks or money orders) supporting the Times Holiday Campaign should be sent to: L.A. Times Holiday Campaign, File No. 56986, Los Angeles, CA 90074-6986. Please do not send cash. Credit card donations can be made on the Web site www.latimes.com/holiday campaign.

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All donations are tax-deductible. Contributions of $25 or more will be acknowledged in The Times, unless a donor requests otherwise. Acknowledgment cannot be guaranteed for donations received after Wednesday. For more information, call (800) LATIMES, Ext. 75771.