USC professor Andrew Ogilvie was standing outside Canyon Coffee in Echo Park last May, his youngest daughter dangling from his chest in a baby carrier, when a gray-haired woman with a New Zealand accent approached him, placing a gentle hand on the baby’s back.
“When she’s having a tough time two years from now, remember this warmth,” she said, smiling.
Ogilvie, who had seen the woman’s photo on missives from the local elementary school, smiled back, honored to be in the presence of an L.A. legend. “Oh, Ruth,” he said. “You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are.”
Like thousands of L.A. parents before him, Ogilivie had just had his first lesson with parent educator and child rights activist Ruth Beaglehole, who devoted her life to countering “childism” — the misuse of power over children — and taught generations of Angelenos to parent their children with empathy and kindness rather than spanking, threats and manipulation.
What Ruth brought was really a paradigm shift in terms of how we thought about parenting.
— Patricia Lakatos, who studied with Ruth Beaglehole
For more than 50 years, Beaglehole, who died April 21 at the age of 81, was a tireless advocate of what she called parenting with nonviolence, disseminating her philosophy in celebrity living rooms, domestic violence centers, schools, jails, social service agencies and occasional one-on-ones with strangers outside coffee shops.
Though she never was an author of a bestselling parenting book like Dr. Benjamin Spock or became a social media influencer like Dr. Becky Kennedy, Beaglehole’s many colleagues and mentees say her teachings rippled across L.A. and the world, helping families break longstanding cycles of violence and oppression toward children.
“What Ruth brought was really a paradigm shift in terms of how we thought about parenting,” said Patricia Lakatos, lead trainer for child-parent psychotherapy at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles who studied with Beaglehole. “It was not about learning techniques to help get your children to behave, but really about thinking of children as human beings who in their own right need to be heard.”
Beaglehole moved from her childhood home in New Zealand to the United States in the late 1960s, eventually settling in Echo Park, where she became part of a community of social justice activists. Over the decades she founded several L.A. institutions including the cooperative daycare Echo Park Silverlake People’s Child Care Center that was immortalized in the Emmy-winning short documentary “Power to the Playgroup” and the Teen and Parent Child Care Program at the Los Angeles Technology Center.
In 1999 she opened the Center for Nonviolent Education and Parenting, where she and her staff, many recruited from the teen group, taught weekly parenting classes in Spanish and English and gave parenting workshops throughout Southern California.
“What Ruth figured out is that whether you’re in a teen program or you’re a more affluent parent who has more access or resources, the reality is that the things parents face cross culture and wealth,” said Glenda Linares, who worked as a parent educator at the center for 13 years after meeting Beaglehole as a young mother, age 15, in 1998. “Parenting is hard.”
A broad cross section of Angelenos attended Beaglehole’s classes, but she was able to create a sense of community and common ground, said Rabbi Susan Goldberg, Beaglehole’s daughter and founder of the eastside Jewish community Nefesh.
“There was this feeling that we are all dealing with the same things and acting the same ways,” Goldberg said. “It was very humbling, and also there was a sense that we were all in this together. We’re all trying.”
Beaglehole also taught overseas, doing workshops in the Congo, Japan, India and a comprehensive multiyear project with the Māori community in Aotearoa, (the Māori name for New Zealand). She also continued to hold classes at Elysian Heights Elementary Arts Magnet, Nefesh and the Center for Pacific Asian Family, preaching the gospel of child-centric, empathetic parenting up until the moment of her death.
In addition to Goldberg, she is survived by her children David Goldberg and Maxie Goldberg, children-in-law Karla Alvarado Goldberg, Brian Joseph and Munira Virji, and eight grandchildren. She remained connected over many years to the father of her children, Art Goldberg, and his wife, Susan Philips.
Beaglehole often started her classes with an open-ended question: “So, tell me what’s going on.” One by one, the parents arranged in a circle would share their struggles, frustrations and occasionally their wins to remain empathetic to their kids in the midst of difficult circumstances.
The situations didn’t need to be dramatic to be significant. Someone might talk about the challenge of getting a kid to brush their teeth in the morning, another might mention the endless battles at bedtime, a third the humiliation of a meltdown 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 up inside the parent and how to approach the situation with more kindness, empathy and respect.
“She always said that all behaviors are an attempt to get our needs met,” said Mel McGraw, who was in Beaglehole’s recent parenting group at Elysian Heights Elementary Arts Magnet. “And in the midst of being triggered, can you remember that this isn’t my child misbehaving, they are struggling with something. And my job as a parent is to help them, and support them, and identify it. And if I can’t identify it, to love them through it.”
Beaglehole didn’t provide straightforward, Instagram-friendly solutions. “I don’t have an easy one, two, three,” she said in a 2022 YouTube video. “It’s a commitment. It’s an intention that we need to set every day.”
McGraw remembers turning to this philosophy after a particularly difficult morning with her kid a few years ago. Her wife was out of town, work deadlines were piling up and there was her daughter, lying on her back in the hallway, screaming that she didn’t want to go to school. McGraw lost her temper and found herself yelling at her daughter and frightening her. They drove to school in silence, tears streaming down both their faces.
After the dropoff, McGraw imagined how Beaglehole would frame the situation. She thought about how her child was probably missing her wife. She remembered that her daughter was having trouble with a friend at school who was being mean to her. And she thought about the pressures she herself was under too, parenting alone for several weeks with little time for work or rest. The blowup was a result of both of them failing to get their needs met, and yet, only one of them was an adult. As the day wore on, she couldn’t wait to pick up her daughter from school to tell her she was sorry for yelling and to repair the relationship.
“It’s those microcosm moments,” McGraw said. “And the kernel of Ruth’s work was that as much as we’re doing it for our kids, we’re also doing it to reparent ourselves.”
Beaglehole’s many students say her work is poised to continue. Her book “Principles and Practices of Parenting With Nonviolence: A Compassionate Guide to Caring for Younger Human Beings” will soon be available on her website, free of charge. Videos on YouTube articulate her philosophy and detail her strategies. The more than 300 parent educators whom she trained now work as therapists, educators, community organizers, social workers and in other fields. And then there are parents who sat in her classes over the years modeling her teachings for their own children. They number in the thousands.
A few years ago Linares created a curriculum based on Beaglehole’s parenting philosophy for migrant parents living in a temporary shelter in Tijuana. When officials at UNICEF saw that work, they asked her to design a similar curriculum for a mobile school bus that could bring Beaglehole’s teachings on parenting to other shelters in the region.
“I was taking the learning I did when I was 19 and thinking, how do I bring this approach to parents who are in extremely difficult circumstances?” said Linares. “They might not know if they are going to cross the border tomorrow, but they do have some agency around the relationship they get to have with their child.”
It’s what Beaglehole taught her whole life: Parenting is always difficult, and it is always — always — worth the effort to do it well.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
