THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602180008
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Patchwork quilts. Feather beds. Biscuits.
Those are the images that come to Naomi Griffith's mind when she thinks of home.
She remembers grabbing a biscuit, breaking it apart and using it to shine her patent-leather shoes for Sunday school. Resting her head in her mother's lap at church. Playing outside her Mississippi home.
But when Griffith investigated her first child-abuse case in 1966, her definition of home expanded.
Walking up to the house, she saw blood on the sidewalk. She heard objects being thrown against the wall as she stood at the door. A young woman with blood on her face answered Griffith's knock.
The woman and her husband, both drunk, had been brawling. Their two children were cowering under a bed. The boy had a red handprint on his face, scratches on his arms and a swollen eye.
``My mom just needs help,'' said the boy, who had tried to break up the fight. ``Please don't take us away. I have to take care of her.''
That was 30 years ago, but the memory is still fresh in Griffith's mind. And the vision has always helped guide her mission of helping families. ``If we don't change how families like this work, we will soon have another whole generation that thinks they know what home is too, and it won't be what we want it to be.''
Griffith, who will give a lecture in Norfolk Thursday, spent more than two decades working as a child welfare worker and supervisor in Alabama and North Carolina. As the years passed, the cases seemed to be sending Griffith a message. By the time the phone rang on her desk, the alarm was sounding too late.
That's why she broke away from investigating in the early '80s to form one of the first child-abuse prevention organizations in the country. She is now executive director of Parents and Children Together in Decatur, Ala.
``When I first started, we had no concept of what prevention was,'' Griffith said. ``It wasn't even an idea.''
Since then, similar organizations have sprung up all over the country to teach better parenting, get help for high-risk families, and encourage companies and churches and teachers and neighbors to help children and families in any way they can, no matter how small.
In speeches she gives across the country, Griffith tells anecdotes about the little ways people can change lives. One of my favorites is a story about an illiterate grandmother who educated her grandson by asking him to read her a page of the encyclopedia each day when he came home from school.
The boy didn't realize until he was grown that his grandmother didn't know how to read.
When Griffith dies, she will be buried in a plot in a Mississippi cemetery where generations of her family are buried. And when that day comes, she has one hope: That at least 10 families are different because she lived.
``If each one of us has a goal of 10 families that we can change a little bit, think of what we can do in this world.'' MEMO: Griffith will present a free lecture, ``Parenting the Angry Child,''
Thursday from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Norfolk Waterside Marriott. The
lecture, sponsored by Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters, is
free, but reservations are required. Call the Children's Health Line at
668-7500. by CNB