Susan Spaeth Cherry sits at a table in the sunny children’s room just off the kitchen of her north suburban brick Georgian.
Around her the walls are covered with dozens of pictures drawn by her two girls, 7 and 12, which appear to represent every period of their lives. Shelves are piled with toys and games, the linoleum floor looks tough enough for any kind of play, and there is a comfortable old sofa and a big TV. It is, unabashedly, a room devoted to making kids feel good, and good about themselves.
That’s one world. The other world breaks in when the phone rings.
“Parental Stress Services,” Cherry answers. In a second her lips draw tight and her eyes narrow in concentration. She listens intently.
Cherry, a free-lance writer, is on her three-hour shift for the Parental Stress Services hot line, a round-the-clock phone operation that gives parents at their wits’ ends a place to get help or just pour out their pain.
The world on the line that is switched from a central number into Cherry’s home for three hours a week is filled with agony, desperation and overwhelming stress.
“I’m sure you feel very helpless,” Cherry says into the phone.
The woman on the other end, who has called about a teenage son she can’t control, begins to cry. As the woman talks, layers of pain emerge: divorce, alcoholism, physical abuse, sexual abuse.
Cherry takes notes on a legal pad, jotting down the woman’s words. “I’ve been a victim all my life,” she writes.
“Let’s try to figure out what we can do right now. Where is your son now? . . . Does he drink just on weekends or every night? . . . No, it doesn’t sound crazy. A lot of people have the same kinds of problems. That doesn’t make it any better, but it isn’t crazy.”
Cherry’s notes quote the woman again: “I feel like I’m an adult body without a mind.”
There is a bright red three-ring notebook on Cherry’s table, an inch thick with listings of hundreds of social agencies in the Chicago area. After 20 minutes of drawing out the woman’s story, Cherry lifts the cover.
“If you had a fantasy of the best kind of help you could get, what would that be like?” she asks. “Because maybe that kind of place does exist and you just don’t know about it.”
Turning to different sections of the book, she suggests agencies where the woman might get help for herself and her son. Some are too far away or unsuited to the woman’s needs. The woman takes down several numbers.
Abruptly the woman says she has to hang up right away. She hears her son coming in from school.
“OK, take care, call again if you want to,” Cherry says quickly before the call ends. She hangs up.
“They all say, `You must think I’m crazy,’ ” Cherry says. “That’s why a lot of people don’t call.”
She shakes her head. “They think that anonymous person on the other end of the line will think they’re crazy.”
Despite that feared shame, a lot of people do call. More than 7,000 phoned in during the year that ended last June 30, according to Child Abuse Prevention Services, or CAPS, the 21-year-old, private, non-profit agency that operates the hot line.
Some were social workers asking for referrals for their clients. Some were parents ordered by the state Department of Children and Family Services to take parenting classes, which CAPS offers. Those are matter-of-fact calls.
Desperation of a typical call
Many, on the other hand, cut to the bone. They are like the call to Cherry, or the re-enactment of a typical call put on at a recent training session for new volunteers by staff member Kathy Alford, taking the role of a caller, and Vicki Brueckner, a volunteer for almost three years.
Alford begins in a rush: “I just found your number in the book. I’m really upset and need help. The kids are driving me crazy and I don’t know what to do. I have an 8-year-old boy who’s in trouble and a 7-year-old who’s not in the right grade. He’s supposed to be in 3rd grade. I have a teenager with a little baby, and I don’t know what to do with the children. They’re causing me a lot of grief.”
“Can we just be silent for a minute? Take five deep breaths,” Brueckner says.
“I’m going to hurt somebody, it’s all too much,” says Alford after a pause. “My oldest boy is 19, and my second is a girl, 16, she has a baby. The two others are my sons, Jonathan and Jason. Jonathan is 8 and Jason is 7.”
“Why did you call?” Brueckner asks.
“It’s really about Jonathan and Jason,” says Alford. “The teacher called from school and said they had been caught stealing at Walgreens. I have whipped them, I have spanked them, and they’re still disobedient. I’m really fed up.”
“What happens after you whip them and spank them?” asks Brueckner.
“They go ahead and do stuff anyway,” Alford says. “I’m afraid I’m going to hurt them. . . . Jonathan is a big boy for 8, and soon he’s going to be too big for me to handle. . . . I’m going to have to get something else for him. Maybe a bat or something.”
The simulated call went on for a few more minutes as Brueckner began suggesting possible disciplinary alternatives to hitting the children, such as taking away their favorite game for a time.
“It’s important with kids to have a specific amount of time,” Brueckner says after Alford mentions she had already unplugged their Nintendo video game.
“Two weeks,” Alford says. “That will break their little hearts.”
“Don’t you think two weeks is too long?” asks Brueckner.
“I’m ready to throw it out the window,” Alford says.
“OK, two weeks,” says Brueckner.
Keep the caller on track
Hot-line coordinator Liane Frey cuts short the demonstration there and asks the two to explain some of what was going on.
“It’s really important to keep the call in focus,” Brueckner says. “If not, it will go off in 10 different directions.”
“You’ll feel as helpless as the parent,” Frey says.
“It’s true she has all those different issues, but if you let her go on, by the time you hang up the phone you’ll hit your head against the wall. They’re looking for you to get them on track, to get the volume down,” says Brueckner.
“I really get mentally into being the parent-overwhelmed,” Alford says. “I feel like she’s not letting me tell the whole story. I wanted her to solve all my problems, then and there.”
“Yeah, in a 10-minute phone call,” Brueckner says.
Sometimes there are immediate crises. Another volunteer, Donna Gaines, got a call from a woman threatening to kill her daughter. “She was on her way out the door to get her daughter at school, and I did fear for her daughter if she went to school,” Gaines says.
“I wanted to keep her on the phone for a long time. I said, `Do you really want to do that?’ That does scare you.”
When they get a sense that a child may be injured or abused or in danger, volunteers try to get an address or phone number and call staff members to get police or DCFS workers to the scene.
“One caller had hit a child and said there was bruises and swelling,” Frey says. “But the caller was afraid of being put in jail. The volunteer stayed on the phone for half an hour and got the caller’s number, and called me. I called the police, and the parent allowed police to get in the house.”
The agency is required to report cases of suspected abuse or neglect to DCFS. “But there’s a lot of leeway,” says Claire Dunham, CAPS program director. “Some behaviors we might consider abuses aren’t reportable. If a parent was hitting a kid with a belt, we might want to explore that. Especially if the kid had marks and bruises.”
Tips for the volunteers
The 50-plus hot-line volunteers are almost all women, and many are social workers or teachers or social-work students whose training requires them to do practical work such as hot-line counseling.
They get two days of training in which they are taught techniques of listening to callers, helping them clarify their problems and assisting them to find agencies and programs that might help them.
They get sample questions to ask in certain situations and responses to make when callers get balky. They get a list of feeling words ranging from “angry” and “anxious” to “vulnerable” and “worried” to help callers define their emotions.
Volunteers mostly stay on for a year, says Dunham. “But some decide right away they can’t handle it, and we’ve had one for 12 years.”
The hot line has been running more than 20 years. It always has been geared to prevention of child abuse, but that term has been kept out of the hot-line name, the posters on buses and trains and the cards the group sends out to schools to go in report cards and other communications with parents. “If we say child abuse, people won’t call,” Dunham says.
Call volume has fluctuated between 5,000 and 7,000 annually for the last three years, according to Dunham. The number of calls increases at report-card time, during spring break, in early summer when school is just out and when school starts again. Long spells of rain and very cold weather bring calls. But just before the Christmas holidays, calls are few.
“Everyone is being good,” says Frey. After the holidays, when the toys are all broken and the bills for them start coming in, the phone starts ringing again, she says.
People call because they have nowhere else to turn, she says. “As society becomes increasingly scattered and there’s no extended family, support systems have broken down. Women going back to work and the increase in single parenting . . . have exacerbated that.
“And as public awareness of the issue of child neglect has increased, there is a conflict about expressing how you feel about the pressures of handling kids. Someone is not going to talk to a friend and say, `I whipped the tar out of the kids last night, and I’m feeling really bad.’ “
A familiar caller
At the Cherry house, another call has come in, from a woman who calls once every couple of weeks when she knows Cherry will be answering, one of the many frequent callers who use the hot line just to get through the day.
Cherry lets the woman talk, not about her two boys but about herself and her relations with her family and friends. The call goes on for 45 minutes, and at the end the woman is so pleased at being able to talk to someone that she vows to call the staff and tell them how helpful Cherry has been.
Cherry says her goodbyes. “You know what she said? She said, `Now I feel better, so I can concentrate on my kids more.’ That’s why I let them go on and on sometimes.”
Cherry beams, and the pale winter sun glows on her kids’ pictures on the wall.
HOW TO REACH PARENTAL SERVICES
The Parental Stress Services hot line is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation staffed by trained volunteers that offers crisis intervention, supportive counseling, information and referral services to parents with problems. The number is 312-3-PARENT (312-372-7368).
The hot line is a program of Child Abuse Prevention Services, a private, non-profit oganization founded in 1974 as Parental Stress Services to reduce child abuse and neglect in the Chicago area.
Other programs are parent training classes, parent support groups, home visits, children’s groups and child-abuse prevention education for teachers and professionals as well as parents and children. Child Abuse Prevention Services can be reached at 312-427-1161.
