Parentline service is proving its worth

Press, 27 August 1980, Page 21

Parentline service is proving its worth

By

GARRY ARTHUR

“I know I am going to hurt my child if someone doesn’t do something,” said a distraught mother on the telephone. By the time help turned up, she was out in the garden and had locked the baby in the house for its own safety. She knew that she was as close as that to doing the child serious harm.

The organisation she turned to for help was Parentline, a telephone counselling service manned by unpaid volunteers — all parents — trained to give sympathy, understanding, and advice, and where appropriate to refer the caller to a specialist organisation for help. In extreme cases Parentline sends out a “fire brigade” — a member of its own stress relief team and a member of Lifeline’s trouble team to take action on the spot. In one such case, a parent threatening to hurt the child made it clear that no professional person who might take the child away should come anywhere near. Both parents discussed the problem with the emergency team, and decided on professional help after all.

Parentline’s counsellors have been answering their telephones for a year now. They have had nearly 300 calls, which come to them through Lifeline’s telephone counselling service (66-743),

Lifeline passes the number of the caller asking for Parentline on to one of 43 counsellors; all have done the organisation’s compressed course in counselling. Backing them up is an advisory board of professionals —- doctors, educators, and psychologists. Volunteers are carefully screened to make sure they have the right qualities. “It would be no use having a counsellor who was undergoing psychiatric treatment, for iritance,” says Mrs Anne Marshall, Parentline’s chairperson.

Parentline counsellors must be warm, friendly, and non-judgmental. Their first duty is to listen—and . very'often that proves to be all that is needed. The parent is glad to have a sympathetic ear, especially an ear that is not official, but just another tarent who understands. Other callers may want advice on specific problems, such as feeding, discipline, strange behaviour, or friction in the family. If the counsellor cannot help he or she can call on professional medical or psychological help and on the assistance of the many child and family organisations — Lifeline, the Marriage Guidance Council, the Society for

the Protection of Home and Family, the City Mission, the Plunket Society, the Child and Family Guidance Centre, and many more. Counsellors do an eightweek course with the community mental health team, Lifeline and Parentline. They are taught the importance of achieving empathy with the callers, listening to their problems, and of not foisting their own personal code of ethics on others. “We want to share the tricks of the parenting trade,” Anne Marshall

says. “People are ill-pre-pared for a lot of this parenting. Then we’re told that we’re doing the wrong thing — that we smack too much, or something like that — but noone ever gives us any alternatives. “Parentline counsellors try to give three alternatives to a parent asking advice. For example, if a mother finds that her toddler is driving her mad

wanting attention when she wants a bit of peace to feed the baby, we might suggest that she brings out a new box of toys at that time, that she tries giving the toddler some of the breast milk, or that she gets a good book out, “Or we might suggest that if she has a friendly neighbour, she could ask her in to help for a while

so that she can have a peaceful feeding time.” One solo mother, rang Parentline at someone else’s suggestion because she was at her wits’ end over her eight-year-old daughter’s sleeping habits. From the age of two the child had refused to stay in bed at night, behaviour which the child health clinic put down to overstimulation >as a preschooler.

The mother’s doctor had not had time to help with the problem, and the child health clinic had also become apparently too overloaded to spare much time. She waited nearly five weeks for an appointment, and was then given just a brief interview. She says she rang Parentline in desperation. The person who was given her number by Lifeline proved to be “a very supportive helpful mother” whose child had also had sleeping problems. “It was a great comfort to find someone else,” she

says. “I knew r I was not the only one, but it was good to have it confirmed.”

She had many long telephone conversations with “Trish,” but never met her or learned her last name. "She gave me plenty of ideas,” she says, “things to try, .and she always rang when she said she ■would. She made me feel important.”

Now her child sleeps right through the night and does not wake her up, which the mother considers a breakthrough. What she gained from Parentline, she says, was emotional and moral support — “first-hand immediate help without having to go through all the red tape of the professionals.”

The mother appreciated the anonymity, too. Not having met “Trish,” she felt she was under no obligation of any kind when she no longer needed her. Quite a few of Parentline’s callers are fathers. Sometimes they are not calling about their own difficulties but because they feel that the mother needs help; others are fathers who have been left to care for the children, and are lonely and unsure of what to do for the best. At times Parentline sends out a visitor to talk to a lonely parent and help with whatever the problem seems to be.

Those problems cover a wide range, but they have a common -feature — they are never unique. And it is by calling Parentline that the distressed parent learns that others have had the same kind of problem with a child, and that something can be done.

Often, Anne Marshall says, it is the parents who are the problem, not the children — because of money trouble, because the parents are incompatible, or are not supporting each other in the discipline of the child, or for many other reasons. “The kid is often the pawn in all this.” Anne Marshall says. “He’s innocent, but often he gets the impression that he is the problem, that he is causing them to split.”

After the first 12 months the picture that emerges of Christchurch parents for Anne Marshall is that they are wellmeaning and want to do the right thing, but that they do not know where to go for the answers. “There are a lot of isolated families,” she says. “Parents ringing us are often wanting to know where the answers are. Parentline is parents helping parents • — if it comes to a serious crunch, there is help right here, in the community.”