Potential's great liberator

Lesley Max

You could be forgiven for thinking that Lesley Max is an over-privileged do-gooder. She stands there, in Jenny Gibbs' art gallery of a house, glinting with marquisite earrings plus her late mother's diamond engagement ring.

Her hair is fresh from the salon, her accent redolent of cultured middle-class parents.

And true, as Max agrees, she couldn't have started the Pacific Foundation, which propels at-risk kids to the top of their classes and out of danger, without the support - financial, emotional and intellectual - of her orthodontist husband, Robert. Nor, probably, without her wealthy contacts.

It's when she starts explaining why she is changing the name of her Pacific Foundation to Great Potentials, and the latest moves in her struggle to help at-risk children, that the real Max emerges. She stands on Gibbs' imposing open staircase and delivers a speech so compelling that people break in every few minutes with "bravo" and congratulations.

As this crowd of more than 100 health workers, colleagues and influential people knows, Max has, over the past 20 years, become a voice of reason and success in a field hamstrung by political correctness, fear and ideology gone wrong.

She is their hero.

As Zoe During, mother of the gene scientist Matthew During, says, "You've done more for Auckland children than anyone else and that's why we've stuck with you."

Tonight Max is doing what she hates most - asking for more money. This time it is to launch both the new name for her organisation and fund her latest initiative, Mentoring and Tutoring Education Scheme (Mates) Junior, for young people who are likely to stumble over the transition from intermediate to secondary school.

Its predecessor, designed to open the eyes of at-risk seventh formers to the possibilities of university, has been a huge success. Mates Junior will get them on track earlier.

As one-time mayoral hopeful Victoria Carter says, don't just praise Max, "open your chequebooks".

For 20 years, after being propelled into action by a journalistic assignment, Max has worked tirelessly for underprivileged children. Her son, Jamie, was born with Down syndrome, and that exposed her to children whose lives were limited by neglect. "Most of them had all their chromosomes in the right places but were not getting the parental interaction that would make the difference," she says. "The wasted potential was tragic."

Her Children's Story - written for Metro magazine in 1986, when New Zealand was still basking in the shreds of its reputation as "a great place to bring up kids" - included a succession of tales of intolerable abuse of small children and babies.

The book she wrote four years later, rigorously detailing our then under-reported child abuse statistics, was called Children: Endangered Species.

The organisation she started - to help turn things round - focused on improving the parenting and schooling skills of low-decile families, starting with 3-year-olds. The results she has achieved have been priceless.

But isn't a pre-school education system, even for underprivileged Maori, Pacific Island and other children, a long way from the brutal murder of 2-year-old Delcelia Witika, whom Max also wrote about, and more recently, the Kahui twins?

No, says Max. This is the way to make sure that the children who come out of those huddles of houses in Mangere, Otara, Waitakere and Beach Haven with their curtains tied in knots, their paint peeling and car wrecks in the backyard, do have a chance to haul themselves out of the poverty cycle.

Those most at risk are hard to reach, she says. Imagine being the Middlemore nurse assigned to visit the Kahui family, with its day-night parties and drunken brawls.

You'd either knock on the door and hope like hell that nobody heard you, or, if you got inside, be extra careful not to upset the family.

"I think there's a lot of justified fear in intervening.

"Even the police [and social workers who are mandated to go into these houses] are reluctant to go into some families.

"Social workers can be told: 'I know where you live, I know your car registration, where your kids go to school'."

So even though they have the power to help, many simply don't.

Meanwhile, the children suffer.

"Our newspapers are full of hostage stories from overseas," Max says. "What about the children living as hostages right here among us? They're suffering, devoid of what's necessary for healthy growth and development while the adults in their lives refuse entry to anybody who may be able to help."

The best way in, she concluded, was through the education system, a premise shared with Alan Duff, who opened many eyes to the lives of these children in his book Once Were Warriors.

Duff started his own programme, Books in Homes, with a wealthy Pakeha woman, Christine Fernyhough. And he and Max both agree the only way into these families, the only way to change things with any real chance of success, is education.

What is the point of the name change? "So people can understand, instantly, more of what we're about," says the classics-educated Max, who had assumed that people would realise that "Pacific" stood for "peace" as well as for its obvious Pacific connotations.

They didn't. The new name, Great Potentials, is clearer and covers all aspects of her team's work, which is broadly devoted to "allowing people, especially children, to develop the potential within themselves".

Max reels off the list of potentials unleashed through the Foundation's Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters from four years up (Hippy) and Mates for older students: allowing parents to be much better teachers than they ever thought they could be; allowing small children to discover they are good learners; allowing the fundamental relationship between parents and their children to flourish as the parents become more skilled in teaching and parenting generally.

"The children get turned on to learning and their parents get turned on to the notion of themselves as really effective teachers," Max says. "They didn't think they had that potential when they started.

"There's also the potential to form a closer relationship with their children because of the structure of the programme."

Hippy gets its clients in different ways. About half the families ask to be included. The rest are referred by schools or attracted by a knock on the door from a parent-child co-ordinator on the lookout for children who might be isolated.

Plus, says Max, "In every area we get a percentage of hard-to-reach families, for whom Hippy is a lifeline, giving them a predictable relationship, some reliability, support and, most important, friendship."

Mates also works on potential, providing university student mentors to work with underprivileged students facing the transition from school and, hopefully, on to tertiary education. Mates Junior, to ease the transition from intermediate to secondary school, will start next year.

The programmes are backed up by the Family Service Centre, which helps parents create safer, more nurturing families by providing guidance and the right kind of help.

Max has graphs that show how disadvantaged Hippy children consistently and substantially out-perform classmates from "advantaged" homes. The research also shows that strengths gained through Hippy in reading and maths carry young people right through their school lives.

Mates is similarly effective.

What makes her programmes stand out from the dozens of similar schemes operating throughout the country?

"It's the difference between having a haphazard approach and having a strategic approach to the welfare of our children," she says. "There's a tendency [among politicians and bureaucrats] to say, 'Oh let's wait until troubles develop and we'll address them'.

"I must say I find that frankly obscene."

She likens her approach to producing outstanding citizens from the country's at-risk families, to cooking a meal.

You read the recipe, assemble the ingredients, prepare it the right way, cook it at the right temperature and for the right time - and it equals success. If you just throw some mismatched ingredients together, leave something vital out, then overcook it, you get a mess.

"It doesn't happen by magic. It's a planned process.

"If we can do this for a casserole, why can't we do it for our children?"

Max points to the fundamental mistakes that have led to our ever-growing pools of deprived kids: young, poor, underachieving solo parents; uninvolved biological fathers and revolving - and potentially dangerous - boyfriends. And lack of parenting support.

"An expert in child health told me the decision to curtail the maternal postnatal stay is one of the largest uncontrolled and un-evaluated clinical trials ever," she says.

"The aim was to replace the support in hospital with support in the community. That isn't likely to happen in disorganised chaotic families or when parents are isolated in well-off communities."

One of Great Potentials' aims is to encourage maternity care that supports breastfeeding and ensures both mother and father know how to soothe the baby.

"Crying babies are at such risk, especially when they're left in the care of young men. Statistically, babies are at the highest risk for being fatally abused in the first year of life."

Max is certain the only sure way to reach our most at-risk children is a national database containing essential information about every child born in New Zealand. She hopes that, despite our privacy laws and attitudes, it will happen soon.

"At this time in New Zealand, a child could never show up at school and no one would be any the wiser."

She blames the inertia around child abuse on two things: "misguided compassion" that makes us value peoples' privacy above children's lives; and what she calls the "Wellington syndrome".

"Our policy comes out of the wealthiest, most highly educated city in the country. And it doesn't sufficiently take into account the extremely damaging way in which so many children and their families exist."

Wellington is also where much of Great Potential's $2.2 million budget comes from. Max travels there at least once a month, tries to make contact with MPs and senior civil servants and has a CV that includes stints as a director of the Northern Regional Health Authority, and membership of the Family Violence Advisory Committee. But Great Potentials receives a "minuscule" proportion of the money poured into the prevention of child abuse.

The Ministry of Education takes care of 65 per cent of the cost of the 21 Hippy programmes and Lottery Grants Board funds make up the rest.

To roll out the programme over the whole country - Max says that would be easy given the precision and rigour of the Hippy blueprint - would cost $7.2 million and reach 4000 families.

As Max says, it sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider a career criminal costs $3 million over his lifetime, the amount is put in perspective.

As it is, "I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to raise funds for what we do. It's my greatest burden."

It may be a burden, but Max is an excellent fund-raiser. David Levene, who read about what she was doing and offered to help, shared the initial cost of the Mates initiative with the University of Auckland. Now the Todd Foundation is involved.

Certainly the night's effort - peopled with the great and the good of Auckland - will once again bring Max, and her potential to change things to the attention of those who can help.

"We've got to see things as they are, remove the veil of misguided compassion in front of our eyes - and plan better," she says.

"We have to take into account what is actually happening, and what can and does work."

How the programmes work

HIPPY

* Caters for 1350 families in 21 low-decile communities stretching from Kaitaia to Motueka.

* Based on a series of 15-minute worksheets that mothers and fathers do every weeknight with 3 to 6-year-olds.

* Each child stays on the programme for two years.

* Once a fortnight a tutor visits parents to offer help and advice. Each week they fill out a report on their child's work.

* Families are: 50 per cent Maori; 30 per cent European; 10 per cent Pacific Island.

MATES

* Operates in 10 low-decile Auckland secondary schools, matching 120 mentors from the University of Auckland with 120 Year 13 students.

* Research indicates "exciting" results.

* Family Service Centre back-up includes Plunket, preschool, Hippy, social workers and parenting courses.

* Lesley Max, married with four children, has an MA honours degree. She is chairwoman of the Parenting Council, a member of the Family Service National Advisory Council and a member of the Brainwave Trust, which disseminates scientific research on brain development and explores the crucial link between nurturing care in the first three years of life and optimal development of the child's brain.