Providers stress importance of child abuse prevention

LYNN – Michael Griswold said he believed former Department of Children and Family Services Commissioner Olga Roche did a good job, despite the fact she resigned her post amid the turmoil that has followed the recent deaths of three children.”I got to meet her,” Griswold said at Wednesday’s Lynn Community Connections 13th Annual Child Abuse Prevention Awareness Breakfast. “I went through DCF, I know they’re going through struggles, but it’s not a bad agency. They gave me a second chance.”LCC’s Program Director Pamela Freeman emceed the event, which brought about 100 people out from agencies across the city and put a focus on the need for fathers to take an active role in their children’s lives.Griswold was living under a bridge on Route 93 and was “kind of OK” with his drug addict lifestyle, he said. But in December 2005 he hit rock bottom and knew it was time to get honest with himself, he said. He was put in detox and then moved into a halfway house, and it was then he got a call from the hospital telling him his son had been born.”I got to hold him, but DCF was there,” he said. “They said because of my record they were going to take my son. One woman told me I would never see my son again.”He said he knew then he had to do whatever it took to get his son back.Eighteen months later Griswold sat in court and listened to the same woman who told him he’d never get his son back tell the judge that Griswold had done everything right, he said. The caseworker told the judge that Griswold made every visitation, even one in the middle of a snowstorm, learned to change diapers, submitted to drug testing and meetings and never missed a step, he said.”That is a day I’ll never forget because they gave me full custody,” he said.Griswold said one program that helped him immensely was a Nurturing Fathers class he took with Leonard Hayes with the Department of Housing and Community Development.Hayes said in 2010 he noticed there were a great deal of single mothers in the shelter system and only about 7 percent of fathers were hanging around. That led him to start the 13-week Nurturing Father Program that, among other things, taught men that they don’t have to parent the same way they were parented.Griswold said he wished the program had been 20 weeks.North Shore Community College President Patricia Gentile also stressed the importance of a father-child relationship.Gentile said she attended the breakfast to share her personal story as well as how her role as an educator can also combat child abuse.In 1995 she and her husband decided to adopt two brothers who had been raised in an abusive home by a neglectful mother and an absentee father before being bounced around the system to seven different foster homes.She said she has seen first-hand what kind of emotional damage that has on young children. Despite eventually landing in a loving, healthy, stable family and the enormous amount of services available to help mitigate the damage that kind of life can leave, “it’s never really fully mitigated,” Gentile said.She said it makes much more sense to invest in prevention rather than mitigation, which was her other reason for attending the breakfast.”We know that education is transformative,” she said. “We know that North Shore Community College has a special role to play to help fathers and mothers get to a place where they can provide.”Hayes said the reality is, however, that the lack of fathers playing a role in their child’s life didn’t just happen.”My generation dropped the ball,” he said, adding “we need to stop giving these guys free passes.”Griswold, who has been clean and sober for nine years, now lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his son, who is 8 years old, healthy and happy.”I know it got better for me,” he said. “I’m on my way to recovery, from homelessness to parenthood. I know there are other dads out there like me, I’m not the only one, but it’s a good feeling that I can do this.”