Rewarding the Daily Heroism Needed From Parents Today

Like all people who work in the media, I am sometimes confronted with the basic complaint people have about journalism: “So why don’t you ever write about a happy (fill in the blank)?” In my case, it’s “the family,” my beat.

Of course, good news, generally speaking, is no news.

Families are news more often now precisely because the picture is so bleak. Their problems, on the personal and on the large scale, seem overwhelming.

Consider, for example, that:

There is a critical shortage of fathers in families. At least half the children in California will be reared by single mothers--and often in poverty.

Teachers say children, even those in intact families, come to school sick and preoccupied with family problems. During the ‘80s, the number of children in mental health facilities soared by 60%, and the number who have learning disabilities jumped 140%.

Drug babies, infant mortality, teen pregnancy--all continue. Parents abuse children; children grow up and abuse their elderly parents.

Nearly 220,000 children are homeless.

Robert Frost once defined home as the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. I wonder what he would say now. When I visit homeless shelters, I ask clients why they didn’t go stay with relatives. Most of them shrug and tell me they just can’t get along with them.

We have reached a point where, as family support consultant Carole Levine told me, “we need to commend people for coping.”

In my neighborhood, in the office and on the family beat, I see people who cope, sometimes against formidable odds. More often they are simply hacking their way through the twisted vines of modern life--the boredom, the heartless corporate life, the lack of time to balance the demands of job, spouse, children, parents and self.

Most will probably never be written about. Perhaps their efforts are too small. They would probably not think of themselves as courageous or newsworthy. Yet in contrast with the large picture, they resemble the heroes Americans are fond of saying we can’t find anymore.

Let’s consider, for example:

* The mother who, physically and sexually abused as a child, painstakingly “reparented” herself by surrounding herself with adults who knew how to treat children humanely, so that she could copy them and crawl out of the cycle of abuse.

* The father who survived his midlife crisis not by shucking his same-age wife but by quitting alcohol and learning to get out of himself.

* The 25-year-old mother who had a child at 15 and now attends UC Irvine, works full time and leads her daughter’s Girl Scout troop.

* The young school principal and harried priest who has deliberately made his old brick school so parent-friendly you can feel the warmth when you walk in.

* The mother who works three jobs to afford private instruction for her child, a dyslexic who had been labeled “slow” in public school.

* The editor who brushed aside the teasing of colleagues when he said he couldn’t work late that night because he had to take his daughters square-dancing.

* All the single mothers--too many to count--who put their children through college and then enroll themselves.

A few years ago, I came across an effort to recognize the heroic efforts of ordinary parents.

It was an annual awards ceremony held in the amphitheater of the Santa Ana Zoo for single parents, fathers and mothers, at Pride Development Center, a subsidized preschool in the poorest area of Santa Ana. The fact that this program made day care affordable for them meant that many of these parents were able to leave welfare and obtain college degrees. Some had also become involved in community work.

Pride’s founder, Dorothy Davis, herself a single mother, explained that every positive step parents take should be rewarded so that they will be encouraged to continue.

At the ceremony, she passed out parchment-like certificates with Gothic lettering that the parents could take home and put on their refrigerators.

Clutching her certificate, one mother told me: “It’s hard to be both mother and father. I’ve shed a lot of tears, but I’m doing a good job, by the grace of God.”

If it seems like a stretch from coping to happy, at least it was a start.

And it was news.