Children's Trust

By Heather Dawkins Stalker, special to the Children’s Trust

Life can be tough. It can throw us cruel curveballs.  We know we have to be flexible and learn from others.  Sometimes, though, we just need help with the basics.  Basics like food, diapers, rent and clothing. The things you have to have to get through a day.  Without them, families find themselves in crisis.

Fortunately, there are folks out there that can help.  Folks like the great team at The Parenting Place, home to Prevent Child Abuse Pickens.

Prevent Child Abuse Pickens is a South Carolina organization that seeks to fill the basic needs of its families first.  “We have a huge storage area in the back of our building where we have diapers and wipes, food, dishes and pans, blankets and sheets and toiletries, paper products,” says Executive Director Gloria Morris.  The agency also stocks a closet with new and gently used baby clothes and shoes, toys, etc.  “People can pretend like they’re shopping, but it’s all free.”

In addition, Prevent Child Abuse Pickens’s Parenting Place is a Benefit Bank—a place where people can come to receive social services without a visit to DSS, which can sometimes involve hours of waiting.  “This can be difficult if you have a baby with you,” says Morris.

The agency’s core focus is on home visits, which Morris says are vital to helping families in crisis.  “It’s going into the home every week and creating those relationships that are going to help families move from dependence on the system to independence and belief in themselves,” she says.  “Knowing that they have somebody to turn to when things go wrong makes all the difference.”

And in addition to meeting basic needs for the families they serve, The Parenting Place works to put families in a place where they can meet those needs for themselves  “We do mock interviewing to give them confidence.  We provide clothes for job interviews.  We work with filling out job applications.  Just knowing what to put down, what to write on a resume is so important.  Knowing the right words to choose.”

Morris says people who have lost faith in themselves have trouble even making the call to apply for a job.  “Sometimes just making that phone call is traumatic.  They don’t have a lot of belief in themselves.  They need someone to sit with them and encourage them.”

Encouragement from The Parenting Place has put many Pickens-area parents on the right track. A mother who came to the agency when her family was facing eviction from their home was able to get not only assistance with her bills, but also help finding a job in the nursing field.  She is making plans to further her education.

An employee at a bank gets tears in her eyes when remembering the support she received from The Parenting Place as a teen mom—support that helped her pursue a four-year-degree and land a job in banking.    And a young father who had lost his job and was struggling to support his family got help finding a job in machining.  He also plans to continue his education.

Helping prevent child abuse, says Morris, is not just about help with parenting, but with self-awareness.  “You can’t parent well if you’re in a state of feeling terrible about who you are.  Parents who have no social outlets, nothing of their own, get bitter and angry and stressed.”

To find resources, visit South Carolina 2-1-1, a critical clearinghouse for finding assistance in your local community. The site keeps a database of a wide variety of service providers including support groups, community clinics, counselors, shelters, food pantries, programs for seniors and many more agencies in South Carolina.

Call 2-1-1 any time 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to link to vital services in your community. This service is free and multilingual.

By Heather Dawkins Stalker, special to the Children’s Trust

Since 1995, nonprofit organization Lighthouse Ministries has been on the frontline of child abuse prevention in Florence County.  One of their best weapons?  Diapers.

Ada Antoine, coordinator of a program for working mothers at Lighthouse Ministries, explains how providing free diapers to their mothers helps keep kids safe.  “A Proctor and Gamble study showed that a child left in a soiled or wet diaper tends to cry more; the parent’s frustration increases; the child is more at risk for abuse and neglect.  We present the diapers to our workings moms so that they won’t be in a position that they have to leave their child in a soiled or wet diaper for longer periods than they need to just to stretch those diapers.”

To help purchase diapers for the program, Lighthouse Ministries collects manufacturers’ coupons.  “We’ve had overwhelming support from the community (sending us coupons),” Antoine says.  “We even have coupons mailed to us from North Carolina and Virginia through word of mouth of our volunteers who have family there.”

The agency also provides baby wipes, lotions, and laundry detergent–other expensive but vital baby care products that financially-stressed parents may have trouble acquiring.  In return for the free products, mothers must attend monthly sessions on budgeting in which they create and try to follow a written budget for their family.

This strategy is aimed at meeting the third of the five protective factors to prevent child abuse:  concrete supports.  While the social connections and resilience we discussed in previous blogs are important, they matter little when family’s basic survival needs have not been met—like the need for clothing, food, shelter, and healthcare.  Agencies that seek to combat child abuse know that, first and foremost, these needs must be met for a family to thrive.

Besides their diaper program, Lighthouse Ministries also helps families get back on their feet with assistance for mortgages, rent, utilites, medicine, food, and other expenses.  But they also arm working mothers with the tools they need to begin handling these expenses themselves.  “Our unique program assists low income working mothers with education, support, and appropriate resources needed to empower them to raise healthy, confident, and safe children,” says Antoine.

The agency holds life skills classes in which moms come together to discuss parenting and other life issues.  “Often the moms think that they’re all alone,” says Antoine.  “They think that they’re the only ones going through those challenges and they see that there are other moms going through the same things.”  In this way, the moms are not only getting support to help with their family’s basic survival, but also forming the social connections so vital in strong parenting.

Fulfilling the basic physical and emotional needs of parents, providing social outlets, and fostering resilience—all are factors that will keep South Carolina children safe and their families healthy.  And sometimes the first step is as simple as clipping diaper coupons.

To find resources like Lighthouse Ministries in your community, visit South Carolina 2-1-1, a critical clearinghouse for finding assistance. The site keeps a database of a wide variety of service providers including support groups, community clinics, counselors, shelters, food pantries, programs for seniors and many more agencies in South Carolina.

Call 2-1-1 any time 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to link to vital services in your community. This service is free and multilingual.

By Kim Welman, Vice Chair of the Board of Directors, Children’s Trust of South Carolina

Being something of a political activist, I’ve often heard people declare with all their passion that we need to pass or defeat a particular piece of legislation “for our children’s future.” In these tough economic times, most of the rallying cries lately have focused on big-ticket items such as health care reform, the deficit and debt ceiling, or tax cuts versus tax increases.

After spending a day at the State House on behalf of the Children’s Trust of South Carolina, I have to ask: If people are so worried about “our children’s future,” then why aren’t there huge rallies on the State House steps every day in support of bills that directly affect our children? Where’s the passion when it comes to concern about their current well-being and development — which will, of course, affect their future in a big way?

For example, the Home Visitation Accountability Act of 2012 (H. 4317) deserves our support and attention. There is convincing evidence of the value of these programs. They promote stronger parenting practices that can improve children’s health, enhance their development and school readiness, and lower the instances of child abuse and neglect.

This legislation would establish a home visitation board to develop specific criteria for home visitation programs. It would collect data about their results and then evaluate them. The bill also would specify how to allocate state funds for these very important programs. A huge thank you to Representatives Rita Allison, Harry Ott, Tracy Edge, Joan Brady, James Smith, Chip Limehouse and Debbie Long for sponsoring this bill!

So what’s the status of this legislation? It had been sitting in the House Ways and Means Committee, but just recently was passed over to the Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee. Our visit gave us the opportunity to hear from that committee’s chairman. What he said wasn’t very encouraging: The bill might not make it out of committee! In fairness, the chairman has agreed to talk about his concerns. I hope the resulting open and honest discussion will lead to some kind of resolution that will keep the bill alive, get it passed and ultimately strengthen home visitation programs in South Carolina.

This isn’t the only piece of legislation currently under consideration at the State House that concerns our children. So if the safety, well-being and status of South Carolina’s children (currently ranked 45^th in the country) are issues that you care about, I urge you to do three things: Sign up to receive The Palmetto Post electronic newsletter from the Children’s Trust of South Carolina. Study the issues. Then speak out. After all, it’s our children and their future that we’re talking about.

As part of child abuse prevention month, we are taking a look at a new protective factor each week. Protective factors are those qualities, characteristics and supports that families have that help keep kids safe and makes families strong. This week we are talking about parental resilience.

Parental resilience. Big words representing a pretty simple concept.

As parents we have to be flexible, we have to be able to bounce back when life gets messy, and we have to be patience.

We know the alternative can be pretty ugly. High levels of frustration can result in yelling, hurt feelings and, in extreme circumstances, lashing out physically. No one wins when parents loose their ability to bounce back.

At a recent meeting, we brainstormed what parental resilience means and those phrases that instantly come to mind.  We came up with some good stuff that is worth sharing.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Keep calm and carry on.

Breathe.

Chill out.

There is always another way.

Sometimes parents need a time out.

Please share your favorite phrases and what runs through your head when life get to be too much.  We would also love to know your tips for how you keep your cool.

Don’t miss our next post to learn what is happening for dad’s at the Julie Valentine Center in Greenville.

By Heather Dawkins Stalker, special to the Children’s Trust

Does this sound familiar?  You are on your way home from work.  You have several places to be at one time.  You and your children are miles from where you need to be before you can settle into dinner and the evening routine. Everyone is hungry and the youngest starts to cry.  Your stress level rises and you don’t know where to turn.  One more tear might send you over the edge.

One thing you can do is call your friends or family and lean on them for help. Those “go-to” people also give us the confidence to know that the stress we feel or the doubts we have as parents are normal.  The pat on the back, the encouraging words can make a huge difference.

Everyone needs those people.  Parenting can be a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, and the ride is so much smoother when we can share both the highs and the lows with other adults–especially other parents, who know firsthand what we’re going through.  For some people, these connections form naturally– with coworkers or family members or parents of children’s friends.  But other people may have a more difficult time reaching out to others.

Parents Anonymous, the oldest child abuse prevention program in South Carolina, has been helping parents form these vital connections for thirty-five years.  At community centers, child care facilities and schools across the state, parents come together in weekly Mutual Support Groups to share their struggles and to seek and offer help.  These are photos from a recent session in Charleston.

“Parents are coming together to connect to each other,” says Executive Director Troy Strother, explaining that, while a trained facilitator attends each meeting, the sessions are parent-led.  “[The parents] really are the support for each other and the guidance—telling each other where to go, how to navigate, what to do . . .”

Last year, close to 1,500 families in nineteen counties were served by Parents Anonymous.  Veronnica Wallace, a member and mother of four, says she was skeptical about the program when she joined in 2010, but it has changed her life.  “I felt like my situation was the worst compared to everyone else.  They made me feel good about coming and expressing myself to where I was ok to tell my story. . . .  I figured out that there are better methods to discipline a child.”

Veronnica is now a parent leader in the program, helping others along the path she has already traveled.

Each year, Parents Anonymous holds a conference to celebrate stories like Veronnica’s and to offer further support for its members. This year’s conference drew 535 participants from across the state.  “Parents went through a plethora of workshops,” says Strother, “anything from the Parent Café, to how to deal with a child who’s gay, to how to work better with the school system, to how do I work with my 14-year-old.”  For children, there was a day of fun at Edventure, and for everyone, a banquet and a night of dancing—a fitting way to celebrate an organization that’s all about bringing people together.

“I feel like what my family and I have gained from being a part of Parents Anonymous is a whole new extended family that gives us support and strength in time of need,” says Tonya Jones, a Parent Leader in Anderson County and member of Parents Anonymous for over a decade.  “We get help and we give help by sharing with our Parents Anonymous family what we have been through.”

“Many parents say that, if not for Parents Anonymous, they would have done something drastic to their children or they would have given their children up,” says Strother, “or that they would have been divorced or separated because they were at their wits’ end.”

The connections parents form through organizations like Parents Anonymous, and through forming bonds with others like you in their community, truly make a difference in that most important of connections—the connection between parent and child.