The USC professor Andrew Ogilvie, was standing outside Canyon Coffee in Echo Park last May, his youngest daughter hanging from his chest in a baby carrier, when a woman with a gray hair with an accent from New Zealand approached him, placing a soft hand on the baby's back.
“When a difficult time is happening in two years, remember this warmth,” he said, smiling.
Ogilvie, who had seen the photo of the woman in letters from local elementary school, returned her smile, honest to be in the presence of a legend of Los Angeles. “Oh, Ruth,” he said. “You don't know who I am, but I know who you are.”
Like thousands of the parents of Los Angeles before him, Ogilivie had just had their first lesson with the parents' educator and the children's rights activist Ruth Beaglehole, who dedicated her life to counteract “infantilism”, the misuse of power over children, and taught generations of angels to the parents of their children with empathy and kindness instead of lever lever, threats and manipulation.
What Ruth brought was really a paradigm shift in terms of how we think about the raising of children.
– Patricia Lakatos, who studied with Ruth Beaglehole
For more than 50 years, Beaglehole, who died on April 21 at the age of 81, was a tireless defender of what she called raising for non -violence, spreading her philosophy in rooms to be celebrities, centers of domestic violence, schools, prisons, individual social and occasional services agencies with strangers outside the cafes.
Although she was never the author of a best -selling parenting book such as Dr. Benjamin Spock or became an influence of social networks as Dr. Becky KennedyBeaglehole's many colleagues and apprentices say that their teachings extended to Los Angeles and the world, helping families break cycles of long -standing violence and oppression towards children.
“What Ruth brought was really a paradigm shift in terms of how we thought about the raising of children,” said Patricia Lakatos, leading of children's psychotherapy at the Los Angeles Children's Hospital who studied with Beaglehole. “It was not learning techniques to help their children behave, but really thinking about children as human beings who, in their own right, need to be heard.”
Beaglehole moved from his childhood home in New Zealand to the United States at the end of the 1960s, finally establishing Echo Park, where he became part of a community of social justice activists. Over the decades, he founded several Los Angeles institutions, including cooperative nursery, People Park Silverlake's ChildrenPower for the game group“And the Child care program for adolescents and parents at the Los Angeles Technology Center.
In 1999 he opened the Center for Education and the father of non -violent aging, where she and her staff, many recruited from the adolescent group, taught weekly classes to raise children in Spanish and English and gave parenting workshops throughout the south of California.
“What Ruth discovered is that if you are in a teenage program or that you are a richer father who has more access or resources, the reality is that the things that the parents face culture and cross wealth,” said Glenda Linares, who worked as a parents educator in the center for 13 years after meeting Beaglehole as a young mother, 15 years, in 1998. “The raising is hard.”
A broad cross -section of Angeline attended Beaglehole's classes, but could create a sense of community and common land, said Rabbi Susan Goldberg, daughter of Beaglehole and founder of the Jewish Jewish community Eastside Nefesh.
“There was the feeling that we are all dealing with the same things and acting in the same way,” Goldberg said. “It was very humiliating, and there was also the feeling that we were all together in this. We are all trying.”
Beaglehole also taught abroad, making workshops in Congo, Japan, India and a several -year comprehensive project with the Maori community in Aotearoa (the Maori name of New Zealand). He also continued to celebrate classes in Elysian Heights Elementary Arts Magnet, Nefesh and the Center for the Asian Family of the Pacific, preaching the Gospel of empathic parenting centered on children until the moment of their death.
In addition to Goldberg, his children David Goldberg and Maxie Goldberg, the children Karla Alvarado Goldberg, Brian Joseph and Munira Virji, and eight grandchildren survive. She remained connected for many years with her children's father, Art Goldberg, and his wife, Susan Philips.
Beaglehole often began his classes with an open question: “Then, tell me what is happening.” One by one, the parents arranged in a circle would share their struggles, frustrations and occasionally their victories to remain empathic with their children in the midst of difficult circumstances.
Situations did not need to be dramatic to be significant. Someone could talk about the challenge that a child brushes his teeth in the morning, another could mention the endless battles at bedtime, a third the humiliation of a crisis in the grocery store. Gently but firmly, Beaglehole would encourage them to consider what their child was trying to communicate, what the behavior was stirring within the father and how to address the situation with more kindness, empathy and respect.
“She always said that all behaviors are an attempt to meet our needs,” said Mel McGraw, who was in the recent Beaglehole breeding group in Elysian Heights Elementary Arts Magnet. “And in the midst of being triggered, can you remember that this is not my son who behaves badly, they are fighting with something. And my work as a father is to help them, support them and identify it. And if I cannot identify it, love him through him.”
Beaglehole did not provide simple and friendly solutions with Instagram. “I don't have an easy one, two, three,” he said in a 2022 YouTube video. “It's a commitment. It is an intention that we need to establish every day.”
McGraw remembers having resorted to this philosophy after a particularly difficult morning with his son a few years ago. His wife was out of the city, the work deadlines accumulated and there was his daughter, lying on the back in the hall, shouting that he did not want to go to school. McGraw lost his stirrups and found himself shouting his daughter and scaring her. They led to school in silence, the tears ran both sides.
After the fall, McGraw imagined how Beaglehole would frame the situation. He thought about how his son probably missed his wife. She recalled that her daughter was having problems with a friend at the school who was being bad with her. And she thought about the pressures she was also, raising alone for several weeks with little time for work or rest. The explosion was the result that both did not meet their needs and, nevertheless, only one of them was an adult. As the day progressed, I couldn't wait to pick up her daughter from school to tell her that she regretted screaming and repairing the relationship.
“It's those microcosm moments,” McGraw said. “And the core of Ruth's work was that, no matter how much we are doing for our children, we are also doing it to repair.”
Beaglehole's many students say their work is ready to continue. His book “Principles and practices of parenting with nonviolence: a compassionate guide for the care of younger human beings” will soon be available in it. websiteNo charge. Videos on YouTube articulate their philosophy and detail their strategies. The more than 300 parents of parents who trained now work as therapists, educators, community organizers, social workers and in other fields. And then there are the parents who sat in their classes over the years modeling their teachings for their own children. They are in thousands.
A few years ago, Linares created a study plan based on Beaglehole's parents for migrant parents living in a temporary shelter in Tijuana. When UNICEF officials saw that job, they asked him to design a similar curriculum for a mobile school bus that could carry Beaglehole's teachings about the raising of children to other shelters in the region.
“I was taking the learning I did when I was 19 years old and I thought, how did I contribute this approach to parents who are in extremely difficult circumstances?” Linares said. “They may not know if they are going to cross the border tomorrow, but they have an agency around the relationship they have with their son.”
It is what Beaglehole taught his whole life: parenting is always difficult, and it is always, always – It is worth the effort to do well.
