Sparing the child

By JAN CORBETT

The last time a biographer mentioned her car, Lesley Max groaned at the implication.

She insists that her elderly Mercedes is worth the same as a bottom-of-the-range Japanese hatchback, and as someone who spends a great deal of time on the open road she demands its sturdy protection.

But given her line of work, you can't help noticing the car. Or the gracious Remuera home where she and her orthodontist husband raised four children.

Lesley Max might outwardly personify a suburb where the wives have been cruelly mocked for being spoilt, idle and superficial, but when she lies awake at night or cannot relax on a family holiday, it is because she is trying to figure out how to get more funding to lift educational achievement among the economically disadvantaged.

A former teacher, she believes that educating children and giving them opportunities to succeed is the key to breaking the vicious cycle of disadvantage that spawns the equally vicious cycle of crime and child abuse.

This month marks the 10th anniversary since Max joined former broadcaster Gordon Dryden to launch the Pacific Foundation For Health, Education and Parent Support, a charitable trust. Its aim is to raise political awareness of child abuse and neglect, and to show parents who were not shown it in their own upbringing that they are the key to their children's development.

At a time when grotesque accounts of child torture and murder dominate the news, this work becomes urgent.

So the question is not why she bothers, but why she bothers about children she and her cherished new grandchild will never encounter in their everyday lives?

"Sometimes I ask myself why," she admits. "It would be more peaceful in my life and there wouldn't be so much struggle and frustration if I didn't care. But I cannot not care."

With a father who was involved in quiet philanthropy and a mother who served in local body politics in Takapuna - "but was always aware of the well-being of people who may not have fitted the Takapuna lifestyle" - she learned early about doing for others.

Mix in her Jewish heritage with its strong belief in social justice, equity and education, add the fact she was raised in a post-Holocaust world, and a strident campaigner for children was the result.

And at a time when the Prime Minister has banned her ministers from drawing comparisons between our social history and the Holocaust, Max is not afraid to. "Imagine as a child growing up knowing that respectable people, as a matter of state policy, would murder children. I grew up with a strong sense that you cannot stand by. What some children in this country endure is not substantially different."

But after 10 years of the Pacific Foundation, not to mention her work with the lobby group Children's Agenda and the Brainwave Trust (which disseminates research on early brain development in the abused and neglected,) has anything improved for vulnerable children?

"I had hoped by now we would be seeing a drop in the number of atrocity stories, but we're not," she says.

"In these 10 years I've seen some good things - the adoption of good principles by politicians and officials who have seen the need for early intervention and the need to work across departmental barriers.

"I've seen children's interests more often written about, and the development of Family Start [based on a blueprint she bought back from Hawaii]. And I've seen the campaigns against emotional and physical abuse and neglect.

"But there is an element of society which has remained untouched by all that."

Although avoiding being drawn on why she thinks Maori child abuse statistics are so high, she is blunt in her criticism of Pakeha gatekeepers within the bureaucracy who make assumptions about what is culturally appropriate "without letting the people from those cultures test a programme for themselves."

She shuns the right-wing view that promotes the family as paramount, arguing that the family is not always the safest place for an abused child. But she also rails against the left-wing view that intervention in the health and welfare of a child is a violation of parents' rights.

As long as privacy issues and the rights of adults continue to take precedence over child protection, she doubts we will ever see what is needed: a central database to ensure every child's health and development is monitored, and where it is a legal responsibility for someone to track down children who have not had several checks during infancy and early childhood.

What has turned into a lifetime crusade, and already earned her an MBE, began for Max when she asked founding Metro editor Warwick Roger for a chance to write for his new magazine.

Her 1986 cover story about the plight of underprivileged children drew the attention of a local publisher who invited her to expand it into a book, published in 1990 with the title Children, Endangered Species? She showed the manuscript to Gordon Dryden and he urged her to join him to launch the Pacific Foundation.

They kicked off with an inaugural grant from the new ASB Charitable Trust and have relied mostly on charitable contributions since, with some Government funding.

Dryden moved on to other projects after a couple of years, leaving Max as a salaried executive director operating from shared offices in Newmarket with the aid of a part-time administrative assistant.

In its 10 years, the Pacific Foundation has distributed $7 million to projects it runs for underprivileged children and has lobbied for funding for other projects it endorses but does not run.

Early on, standing at the bench elbow deep in the dishwashing water, Max decided that at-risk families needed a one-stop shop where they could take their children for early childhood education, see a Plunket nurse or a social worker or even a lawyer, and learn life skills such as driving or their consumer rights.

The first of these family service centres opened in 1992 at the Kelvin Road Primary School in Papakura. Buoyed by its initial success, Max went to Wellington and lobbied caucus. As a result here are now six Government-funded family service centres throughout the country.

She says this integrated approach to early intervention spanning health, education and welfare boundaries had not been tried before "but now it is becoming common currency, which is fantastic."

At the same time she was scouring the world for effective programmes to lift educational attainment among families at the bottom of the heap and was pointed to one in Israel known as Hippy, an acronym for home instruction programme.

But the Israel connection has been problematic. Not only do her detractors accuse her of being ethnocentric, but she has endured "a saga in frustration and bewilderment" trying to get the Ministry of Education to fund it.

She thinks this is because a structured programme like Hippy does not conform to the fashion for free play in early childhood education. She thinks it also met resistance because it came from an outsider working through politicians, rather than having been developed by the education bureaucracy.

Its final black mark, she believes, is that it was not developed in New Zealand, a charge that infuriates her. "Do we not use the microchip or the combustion engine because they weren't developed in New Zealand?"

It took until the run-up to last year's election for Max's considerable lobbying abilities to finally persuade outgoing Education Minister Nick Smith to contribute 71 per cent of the funding for the next two years. Until that, the chief funder was the Tindall Foundation.

Now she counts 16 Hippy programmes from Kaitaia to Motueka, catering for 1280 families at a cost of $1200 a family. That adds up to $1.5 million over two years. She hopes a further three programmes will start next year.

Under the Hippy system, tutors role-play with parents, showing them how to spend 15 minutes each day role-playing with their children to impart language, spatial relationships and problem-solving skills. Parents teaching and playing with their children does not happen naturally in all households, according to Max, yet it is the key to child development.

The cool reception Hippy enjoys in Wellington is made up for by the enthusiasm for it in the staffroom at the Kelvin Road Pre-School and Whanau Centre where the tutors regularly gather.

Former kindergarten teacher turned Hippy coordinator Louise Barry describes pounding through suburban Papakura knocking on the doors of houses where sometimes people are not so much living as barely existing. Her job is to encourage the mothers into the Hippy programme. While she finds this part the hardest, she seldom takes no for an answer.

What excites Barry most is seeing the change that comes over shy, withdrawn mothers who never thought they had anything to offer their children. Initially she sees them dragging themselves to the weekly meeting with tutors. After a while they bound in.

Some go on to be tutors themselves, which is why it works, says Barry. This is not about professionals turning up to interfere with raising the kids, but mothers who have been in the same situation helping others.

For some it is their only structured contact with other mothers. Barry's happiest story centres on the mother who was offered the programme, became a tutor, then went on to graduate from teacher training college.

Max points to extracts from a 1997 Government evaluation citing improved language and mathematics skills in children enrolled in Hippy, making them less likely to have learning problems when they start school. It also notes how parents gain an understanding of the education process and their role in it.

When it comes to one-on-one work with these mothers, who are mostly Maori or Pacific Islanders, as are the tutors, Max knows she would be the wrong woman for the job - way too white middle class. Instead she sees her strength as selecting the coordinators who have the right personality for the role and in doing the lobbying, fundraising, problem solving, research gathering and profile raising that keeps the money coming in and the programme expanding.

Now she has another project in her sights and has opened discussions with the University of Auckland to join a mentoring scheme. The idea is to invite students to mentor children for several hours each week in return for half their fees being paid. It, too, is modelled on a scheme she saw in Israel, and again it cannot work without Government funding.

More broadly, she is still looking for the model that reconciles adults' rights with child protection. "I'm sure New Zealand can do it infinitely better," she says. "I thought we had a problem when I started, but we have a greater problem now."

Herald Online feature: violence at home

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