Parenting is a tough job, and Maria Regalado knew she had gotten it wrong with her two oldest children.
After spoiling her first son, now 24, she found him to be lazy and expecting to be coddled. And having failed to develop a positive relationship with her daughter, Regalado now sees her only on visits to the county jail, where the 21-year-old is serving time for stealing cars.
So when a friend told her about free parenting classes at Brownson House, a Catholic Charities community center in East Los Angeles, she saw an opportunity. She could learn to better raise her three youngest children and the two grandchildren that her incarcerated daughter left behind.
"With parenting classes, it doesn't matter how old your kids are," Regalado said. "The minute they're born, you need to know how to treat them, how to talk to them."
But the 44-year-old grandmother also had another incentive: free diapers. In exchange for regular attendance at the six-week parenting course -- every Thursday for two hours -- in February and March, Catholic Charities promised a week's worth of diapers.
"I think this was a great way of putting it together, a very smart thing to do," said Jasmin Hernandez, a case manager at Brownson House. "If we were just to advertise that we had diapers, we would have finished giving them out in half an hour."
The mutually beneficial arrangement sprang from a partnership between Catholic Charities and the newly formed Los Angeles Diaper Drive -- a nonprofit service that provides free diapers to low-income parents.
The charity group provides the venues and hires instructors from Community Outreach for Prevention & Education, a nonprofit healthcare organization; the diaper drive brought a week's worth of diapers to each class for distribution.
Since its inception last year, the partnership has provided three sessions of classes open to low-income parents: two 12-week programs and one six-week course. Class sizes range from 10 to 14 people. The next session starts this month.
"We didn't want to just give them a freebie, 'Here's a packet of diapers,' " said Melissa Ratcliff, a Los Angeles Diaper Drive co-founder. "Giving them something concrete they can use was important to us."
The parenting class curriculum, put together by Community Outreach for Prevention & Education, covers parent and child nutrition, domestic violence and child abuse, baby sleep patterns, child discipline and various styles of parenting.
