Phyllis and David York got involved in community work that arose from personal trauma. One of their three daughters was arrested for robbing a cocaine dealer, the capping point of a history of troubles. They'd tried everything they knew to help her (and they were family therapists themselves in Philadelphia). A threshold had been crossed: they couldn't bring themselves to bail their daughter out of jail.
Instead they turned to their friends for help. They asked for community support, and they got it. Out of that incident, TOUGHLOVE was born.
TOUGHLOVE is an approach for parents who have trouble raising their teenage children, or whose teenagers are getting into trouble, and usually both. The approach typically involves parent self-help groups which meet regularly to support each other, to change family behaviour, and to set limits, or 'bottom lines.' More than one thousand such groups meet in the States and Canada (with also 75 groups in New Zealand).
The Yorks believe that the community has a responsibiilty with parents for the raising of kids. If kids go wrong, it's partly because community standards have been poorly defined or poorly taught. The community has to take care of its own. In that respect TOUGHLOVE is an intentional model for community involvement.
The Yorks started TOUGHLOVE mainly for themselves and for the people around them, not thinking in larger terms until a local magazine story appeared, got spread around, and touched a national nerve. Now it is an international non-profit organisation.
Interviewer: How did things move from calling up a friend and getting support for your daughter to broadening the network?
David: Someone we knew in this local community called us up and said they were having trouble with their son who was seventeen. He'd taken off. He'd taken his father's camel hair coat, and his whisky, and done a whole number on him. And now the father says, 'Now what do I do? I don't know where the kid is, he's somewhere around, but we don't know where he's living.'
So we said, 'Call up the people in your community; call up your friends, your neighbours, and get everybody together, because we know your son's living somewhere in this New Hope vicinity. Let's see if we can track him down and cut off his resources.' And so they got thirty folks together, and that was our first TOUGHLOVE group....
We became like the leaders of this group. That was okay for a while, but after about seven or eight months, it got to be really tiring, to go every week to this meeting. And we began to put a manual together...
Time magazine interviewed us. And the gal that interviewed us had a hard job getting it published; they didn't want to publish it. They thought it was too radical a movement.
Phyllis: Kicking the kids out.
David: YYeah, it runs against the common trend of the poor kids, you know, suffering from terrible parents.
Phyllis: Then when Ann Landers put it in, we got fifteen hundred letters a day for I don't know how long. Ten days, we got fifteen thousand letters. Over two thousand phone calls in a week. At this little office in Sellersville, with one person, one maniac person, working.
- TOUGHLOVE, P.O. Box 1069, Doylestown, PA 18901, USA (tel 215 348 7090). Toughlove has spawned books, a newsletter, and a movement; and nowadays there are also 'kids' groups' running in parallel with the parents' groups, where the children tackle problems with the assistance of a trained counsellor. There are no registered groups in the UK yet, but the book 'Toughlove' by Phyllis and David York and Ted Wachtel, is published by Bantam Books, New York and is available from Toughlove for $4.
- This interview is excerpted from 'Local Heros - The Rebirth of Heroism in America' which is published by Lexington Books, 125 Spring Street, Lexington, Massachusetts 02173, USA, price $17.95, 1987. Bill Berkowitz, the book's author, is at 12 Pelham Terrace, Arlington, MA 02174, USA (tel 617 646 6319).