A Source of Comfort for Latchkey Kids : A Phone Call Can Provide Reassurance to a Child Alone at Home

A telephone counseling service designed to combat loneliness and fear among San Diego’s estimated 18,300 latchkey children went into operation Thursday.

Called Tele-Pal, the new service is similar to the Phone Friends program in Washington and Kids Line in Chicago, but instead of depending on phone banks, computer technology links calls from children to trained volunteers in their homes 24 hours a day.

Pamphlets outlining the service are being distributed in San Diego schools. When a child dials 571-1234, the call is diverted by a computer at Youth Development Inc. to one of 30 volunteers, many of them senior citizens, who donate four hours a day.

It was through the yearlong efforts of four women--Shay Elterman, Arleen Tuchscher, Lynette Cudney and Laura Engelberg--that the service was organized.

Elterman, office manager for Rep. Bill Lowery (R-San Diego), said background checks of prospective volunteers and lengthy interviews with them are conducted before their training sessions.

Roxanne Turner, a volunteer, said the training focuses on “learning not to be a parent, but learning to be a listener. The dialogue program really delved into some deep questions a child might ask. It’s not an easy task.”

If a call indicates a serious problem, there is a long list of agencies the volunteer can contact, she said, but the six calls she received Thursday afternoon were from children who wanted to make sure someone would answer their calls.

Tuchscher said Tele-Pal is not a substitute for a call to 911 or a parent, but is intended to provide someone to talk to when children are alone and feeling trapped or afraid. The number of latchkey children--those who because of working parents spend several hours at home alone each day--has grown in recent years with the increases in one-parent households, career-oriented mothers and the cost of day care. Experts estimate that there may be as many as 15 million latchkey children in the United States, she said.

County Supervisor Susan Golding helped the organizers get in touch with Jim Vaus, founder and chairman of Youth Development, which already had a call-diverting system in operation for its toll-free hot line for runaway children.

Engelberg, the only full-time staff member among the four organizers, now has an office at Youth Development. She said training of the volunteers is designed to make them “stop thinking like parents, but like a third person who cares.” She said volunteers can only ask children what school they attend. The training program includes role-playing and workshops.

She said that volunteers will keep a log of calls received and make weekly reports. In three weeks, all the volunteers will get together to discuss the types of calls they have received and participate in additional role-playing.

Financial support for Tele-Pal has come from private sources. Home Federal Savings paid for the printing of brochures and telephone stickers. The Friends of Children United Society donated $5,000 for a computer and National University provided rooms for training classes.

Although some calls weren’t getting through during the day Thursday, the problems seemed to have been overcome by mid-afternoon. Engelberg said the cause was the inexperience of operators.