CLEVELAND — Right now in Cleveland, many pregnant teens and young mothers in foster care are in urgent need of a safe place to call home.
Those with the Pressley Ridge Parent Child Foster Care program in Cleveland said placing pregnant teens or young moms is already a challenge, but like many other things it's become that much harder because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pressley Ridge is an organization that provides services for children and families. They’re hoping more people will step forward to give those pregnant and teen moms the support they need.
For 10 years, Alicia Cross has welcomed foster children inside her Cleveland Heights home. Five of them have been teen moms.
“The first kid I got that was pregnant was 15 years old,” Cross said.
Just days after that teen was placed in Cross’s home, she went into labor and after being rushed to the hospital, she gave birth to a baby girl.
“I just instantly became her mom and the baby's grandma,” Cross said.
And over the years, Cross has become mom to so many more, teaching them how to be mothers in turn.
“The bathing, how you got to be gentle and how when you get angry, you can’t start just thrashing your baby around—a lot of teaching,” Cross said.
Pressley Ridge is looking to recruit and train more foster parents like Cross for the PCFC program which specializes in care for kids with behavioral or emotional problems stemming from traumatic experiences —and finding stable homes for pregnant and teen moms.
“PCFC is a piece of the treatment foster care program. And what we really do is work with teen moms who are being placed with their child or children. What we have to do is recruit and train foster parents to support both the mother and the child and provide services for the young mother and her child,” program director Lisa Allomong said.
But it's been tough lately.
“Things have become worse with the pandemic. There have been a lot of stressors on families, on top of what everyone was dealing with before,” Allomong said.
Allomong said it's hard to find people who want to make a difference and welcome two children into their home instead of just one.
“Coming in as a young mother with a new child, I think it's very difficult and very scary. They really need a lot of extra support, they need somebody who can be very patient who can really teach them skills that they need,” Allomong said.
The ultimate goal is to reunify them with their families, help them ensure that their own children won’t end up back in the system, and build new relationships to last a lifetime in the process.
“We see foster parents that bring children back. They have nice Thanksgiving dinners or for the holidays or for their birthdays,” Allomong said.
Cross said it's one of the most rewarding parts of what she does.
“It's a joy because when they come back and they're still calling me mom, I feel like I had an impact. I really had an impact,” Cross said.
Pressley Ridge offers training to people interested in becoming foster parents.
“What we'll do is take an inquiry, so somebody calls in and just says they're interested. We will sit down and meet with them, and really talk to them a little bit about what it means to be a foster parent and what's involved in the process. And that includes our pre-service training,” Allomong said. "So our pre-service training is evidence based. We provide training, right now we're doing it by Zoom, but we also do in person training, and then we do a home study process after the training. And that's really looking at identifying those pieces that will make them great foster parents, their strengths, what training areas they need, and look at it —really pulling everything together and then getting them licensed.”
More information can be found on Pressley Ridge’s website.
Jade Jarvis is a reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Download the News 5 Cleveland app now for more stories from us, plus alerts on major news, the latest weather forecast, traffic information and much more. Download now on your Apple device here, and your Android device here.
You can also catch News 5 Cleveland on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Hulu Live and more. We're also on Amazon Alexa devices. Learn more about our streaming options here.
