Tapu Misa: Even basket-case parents can be taught how it's done

COMMENT

So it's official then. Charlene Aplin was a bad mother. CYFS may have tragically stumbled in its attempts to protect her two girls from their murderous stepfather, but it was she who allowed that violent and sick man into her children's lives, she who failed to protect them by continuing a destructive and abusive relationship that she must have known was putting them at risk.

Even CYFS, while it shouldered the blame for its mistakes, admitted that it was a struggle to impress on the mother the need to protect her children as she moved from one violent relationship to another. And to be honest, I've found it difficult to summon much sympathy for her. I cannot fathom how a mother could not ever put the safety and well-being of her children ahead of her own needs.

But then I can't imagine either what Charlene Aplin's life must have been like, how she became the person she is. Not here from my comfortable middle-class suburb, to which education, employment and good fortune has brought me. Here, there is no shortage of family and neighbours and friends to prop me up and prevent me ever venturing into negligent mother territory.

It takes a village to raise a child, as the African saying goes - and I can't help feeling that the village has let those children down.

It's all too easy to damn the deadbeat parents among us. Finding solutions presents a little more of a challenge. Should we, as one former politician has suggested, be taking a mallet to the welfare state and the much maligned DPB which is apparently encouraging so many poor, stupid people to breed?

I've no argument with the view that parents are accountable. We've seen evidence lately of some truly derelict parenting (though I'd argue that its not only the poor and those on benefits who fit that description). But blaming people for the wretchedness of their lives and dismissing parents as merely stupid and hopeless relieves society and the Government of any responsibility to act. If they're beyond hope, all these bad parents, and their progeny an inevitable millstone around our necks, then there's no point even trying.

Yet we can't afford not to.

The British Medical Journal in May 1998 noted that parenting is probably the most important public health issue facing our society. It was the single largest variable implicated in childhood diseases and accidents; teenage pregnancy and substance abuse, truancy, school disruption and underachievement, child abuse, unemployability, juvenile crime and mental illness. In New Zealand we are failing in that preparation for parenthood.

The Pacific Foundation runs programmes dedicated to raising educational achievement among the people whom others have written off as too poor and hopeless to help. They begin at pre-school and, according to independent evaluations, they work. They have proved that if you show parents the way and then support them, most will respond, even those who fit the basket-case stereotype - the poor, undereducated single parents and beneficiaries.

In a study of families who had gone through HIPPY (home improvement programme for parents and youngsters), all reported not only that their kids were doing better at school - as well and sometimes better than competent children from better off homes - but also that they'd become better parents.

One Pakeha mother said that HIPPY had saved her life and that of her three children. She meant it literally. She'd left school at 14, and had a history of drug addiction, prostitution and violent relationships. All three of her children had been born addicted to drugs.

She started a relationship with a really violent, psycho guy who abducted her and the children. "He locked the kids in a cage and he kept me locked in. It was only because the HIPPY tutor couldn't find me for a few days that she got worried and called CYFS. The police came looking for me and found me and let us go," she said.

She became a Christian, got off the drugs and is now back with her husband. They both have steady jobs. She's on a school board of trustees and one of her children wants to become a lawyer.

I like the story, too, of the Maori solo dad who grew up in Otara. He left school at 14, joined a gang and then spent 30 years as a delinquent, living on money from crime and the benefits and doing drugs.

He fathered seven children - the first, at 14, was adopted - but he's brought up only one, a son, whose mother also came from a violent background. A friend talked him into joining the HIPPY programme, which showed him through role-playing how he could teach his son, even with his limited education. As his son learned, so did he.

He later became a tutor, and now teaches at a kohanga reo. He's studying to be a teacher. His son is 10 now and doing well at school. He loves books and reading, and art.

So why aren't there more schemes like this in every corner of the country? That's another story.

* Disclosure: Tapu Misa is a trustee of the Pacific Foundation.

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