Casa Pacifica opens interactive cente
Observation rooms make real-time counseling available for parents
By Michelle Knight knight@theacorn.com

Where's an expert when you need one?

Casa Pacifica has the answer for parents trying to break a cycle of abuse in handling unruly children. The facility that treats abused and neglected children recently unveiled its new Parent Child Interactive Therapy Center to treat children age 2 to 7.

Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks was among the dignitaries who attended the October grand opening.

She said the county saw the value of the center and asked Casa Pacifica to make the center available to all children of Ventura County whether they're served by Casa Pacifica or not.

Verizon gave Casa Pacifica a $100,000 grant to develop the center.

"We take this very seriously," said Verizon spokesman Jon Davies. "And this is one of the best programs we've seen."

What looks like a portable school classroom on the Camarillo facility campus is a set of three tandem rooms with observation quarters in the middle. Here, a counselor observes parent and child as they play and coaches the parent via an earpiece on what to say and do when the child misbehaves.

Psychologist Anthony Urquiza, who developed the concept and helped set up the Casa Pacifica center, said the goal is to break abusive patterns and teach parents new skills. To that end, it's essential that the therapist is unseen and unheard by the child during a session so the parent is viewed as the agent of change, he said.

"We want the parent and child relationship to be primary," Urquiza said. "If we can improve the quality of the relationship- that will sustain over time."

At either end of the observation room are two play rooms that look deceptively ordinary.

Urquiza, director of mental health services at U.C. Davis Medical Center, said the children who require this level of care are very aggressive and defiant and often abuse a light switch and throw toys. So a key turns lights off or on and toys are stored in covered plastic containers in a locked cabinet.

Urquiza began developing the concept for the center in the 1970s when, as an evaluator, he assessed whether a parent whose child was removed from the home due to abuse could be reunited with them.

He thought it unfair that the services parents had received up to that point were inadequate to prepare them to handle the child. And he said parents were unlikely to read the literature psychologists and other mental health professionals gave them.

The center, on the other hand, affords parents a better chance of successful and long-term reunion with their child because the therapeutic sessions make practical advice from a psychologist instantly available. Research shows six years af

ter treatment, parents were still using the skills they had learned at the center, he said.