(The following story, which appeared in the January 2004 issue of Waco Today, is reprinted with permission of the Waco Tribune-Herald.) My child, get up’
By LAURA FIEDLER |
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| Volunteer mentor John Willome watches children create artwork
at the Talitha Koum Nurture Center. Kelly Lemons photo/Waco Tribune-Herald |
Talitha Koum was begun
by CrossTies, an ecumenical ministry that has served the Kate Ross
neighborhood for 15 years. During that time, CrossTies staffers
have witnessed a continuing cycle of early pregnancy, drug addiction,
students dropping out of school and young people becoming incarcerated,
said Susan Cowley, a Talitha Koum board member. The goal of Talitha
Koum is to break that cycle by reaching out to
at-risk children at a very early age.
“We’ve studied
brain research and found the mind of a birth-to-3-year-old is formed
at a rapid pace by either chaos or consistency,” she said.
“Our desire is to provide a high level of consistency in behavior
and care by how we structure the day.”
Cowley said it is important
that Talitha Koum works with parents as well.
“We strive to
teach parents how important it is to nurture their child,”
she said. “It’s all too easy for disadvantaged families
to be overwhelmed by the struggle of working several jobs, going
to school and maintaining a home. They often can’t spend that
all-important one-on-one time with their children.”
The Nurture Center is
not simply a child-care facility for infants to 4-year olds, Cowley
said. “These children need more than child care. Our therapeutic
nursery is highly supported by some very gifted play therapists
in Waco who donate their time.”
The goal is to get the
children to an age-appropriate level physically, emotionally and
mentally. In one instance, she said, that meant taking a child with
chronic sinus infections to a specialist. Numerous visits to clinics
and emergency rooms had not helped. The specialist diagnosed the
problem and the child had her tonsils and adenoids removed. Since
the operation, teachers report that the child’s hearing has
improved and her speech is developing more rapidly.
“If there is no
advocate for a child in that much poverty, what is really going
to happen?” Cowley asked. “It will take a long time
and possibly not until they have had their physical health so damaged
or their speech patterns so disrupted that, by the time they go
to school,they are way behind. They have real problems that need
remediation from an early age.”
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| “Our children are becoming much more compassionate with
one another,” says Kim Jamison, executive director of
the Talitha Koum Institute. Kelly Lemons photo/Waco Tribune-Herald |
The center’s three
full-time teachers and one assistant teacher instruct the children
on everything from language development and counting to conflict
resolution. The teachers say they have seen a big change in how
the youngsters resolve conflicts.
“If there’s
a conflict between children, we’ll intervene using a conflict
resolution process,” said Donna Losak, Nurture Center director.
“We’ll say, Choose your words and tell her what you
mean. How can we solve this?’ It’s important that they
see there are other methods of solving a problem.”
Losak said the efforts
are paying off. “I get real excited when I hear them say Excuse
me, I need to get by’ instead of Move or I’m gonna whip
you!’ ”
Jamison agrees. “Our
children are becoming much more compassionate with one another,”
she said. “We’re seeing much more empathy for one another,
where when we first opened we saw a lot of pushing, shoving and
hitting and really fussing at one another. We’re now seeing
them use a lot of the conflict resolution that we’ve been
using with them over the past several months.”
Jamison said she was
encouraged by what she heard at a recent parenting meeting. “Parents
are seeing the same improvement with the children.
They’re seeing some of the same things at home that we’re
seeing here. We were really hoping that would happen.”
Although teaching toddlers
and caring for infants is a big part of what the center does, there
is a strong emphasis on nurturing. “Any adults that are free
will come into the room at nap time and rock the children to sleep,”
Losak said. “They really enjoy being rocked and having that
physical contact and having somebody pat their backs.”
Even with teachers providing
as much personal attention as possible, they saw a need for more
one-on-one attention. The solution has come in the form of a baby
mentor program known as Naomi’s LAP (Loving, Attentive Participation).
The name comes from a Bible story in the book of Ruth: “Then
Naomi took the child, laid him on her lap and cared for him.”
“The mentors are
so essential,” Cowley said. “These are people who don’t
teach in the program, but they come in and they give essentially
to one child, at least an hour a week of their time. Some give a
couple of hours.”
John Willome is one
such volunteer whose heart was captured when he went to the Nurture
Center one day. “I went down there just to visit with Kim
about mentoring, and as I was leaving, the little 3-year-old girls
who were out in the gym saw me. They didn’t know me from Adam,
but they ran to me and threw their arms around me and wanted to
be picked up and held,” he said.
Willome, who has two
young children of his own, visits the center twice a week and plays
with the children for two hours ˜ time that is well-spent,
he said. “There’s an opportunity there to invest in
kids in really tremendous ways and in a way that is completely beyond
yourself.”
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| Nurture Center director Donna Losak gets a big hug from a
cape-clad youngster. Kelly Lemons photo/Waco Tribune-Herald |
Volunteer Connie Murphy
has found that spending time once a week with the children at the
Nurture Center has filled a void in her life. “My kids were
all grown, and I was kind of suffering from empty nest syndrome,”
said Murphy, a grandmother of three who works full-time. She also
is part of a group from Central United Methodist Church in Waco
that takes food to the parenting meetings once a month.
Murphy says she’s
seen a noticeable change in the children since she started volunteering
last January. “When I first met them, some of them were not
interacting with the other children very much. They were quiet and
didn’t play a lot. One little girl in particular now plays
and interacts so much more, and she’ll run up to me,”
she said. “Another girl who used to cry all of the time has
changed so much that now when I
come, she’ll run up and hug me and she’ll play and be
happy. That’s really neat.”
Cowley said that more
mentors are needed so children can receive the one-on-one attention
they crave. “When anyone comes into the room, the children
want so much to be a part of the attention-getting that they all
swarm this person, and the only way the one-on-one relationship
evolves over time is that a child and a mentor will gravitate toward
each other.”
Cowley said the center
is looking for healthy adults who love children. "There’s
a screening process which is required by our license, and we do
run a criminal background check. Other than that, we have some training
for our baby mentors, and a lot of it is on-site as they sit there
and watch us work.”
In addition to recruiting
volunteers, Talitha Koum also hopes to draw financial support from
the community. “Money for the program is a big issue,”
Losak said. “We’re month-to-month. We’re constantly
working on fund development, trying to look for grants and funding
from any sources available. That’s a very big need. We have
to have materials. We have a pretty good waiting list. We need to
remodel another side of our
building so that we can have more classrooms because we have more
children who need our care.”
Connie Murphy has seen
for herself the kind of care children receive at the Nurture Center.
She said she is impressed with how the teachers will stop what they
are doing just to pick up a child who needs to be held.
“The people that
work there are really committed to making those kids happy,”
she said. “It’s not just a job to them, it’s really
a calling.