Crab feed fund-raising event will benefit ICARE Center

A Coeur d’Alene parenting center will hold a crab dinner and sell a skiff to the highest bidder with hopes of smooth sailing this year.

Morgan Richardson, executive director of the ICARE Children and Family Advocacy Center, is looking forward to the center’s third crab feed fund-raiser, which includes auctions, live music by Coeurimba! and dinner. The event will be held Friday at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. Money raised will help ICARE continue to offer child abuse prevention and intervention programs. The organization helps parents in Kootenai County by offering advice and problem-solving skills.

“It’s a hard job, but if you don’t have anybody to help give you support or help you learn, people go berserk,” she said.

Richardson said a majority of parents in contact with the group have been abused or neglected and have a likelihood of repeating the parenting style they were brought up with.

Richardson works with three other family support coordinators with ICARE. The coordinators go to homes and work with parents by giving advice and alternatives. Richardson said nearly all salaries, rent, supplies and utilities are covered by grants and donations. She hopes to raise $10,000 at the crab feed to make up for uncovered expenses.

Cheryl Elmose, a homemaker in Rathdrum, has been using the program for five years after responding to a newspaper ad. She said she was brought up to do what she was told or else, and when she had kids of her own, she became frustrated with her parenting skills.

“Parents don’t have a whole lot of time to go out and learn to be parents,” she said.

Elmose has three children, so the house calls help ease the burden of finding child care so she can keep learning. So far, she’s taken several classes and had evaluations on her kids’ language skills and coordination.

Elmose said the toughest skill for her to learn was putting aside a forceful tone in favor of offering choices. Instead of yelling about not wearing their coats, she gives her kids the option to carry them. In the long run, she hopes they’ll wind up making the wisest choice on their own.

“When they become teenagers, they’ll have had choices all their life and they have to have the power to make those choices,” she said.

Parents who make the wrong choices and wind up in court are often required to get help, said John Mitchell, Kootenai County’s First District Court judge. Mitchell was on the original ICARE board of directors about 10 years ago and remained on the board for about 10 years.

Many times, parents facing him in court have committed drug-related or other crimes that could put their kids at risk, he said. But many who take parenting classes get a lot out of them, he said.

“That’s the beauty about parenting skills,” he said. “There’s no owner’s manual when you get a kid.”

Richardson said the group could help prevent some crimes, such as deaths caused by shaking babies, by encouraging parents to work out their anger by taking a walk or some deep breaths.

“They’re not hard things to learn, but when you’re caught in that corner, people don’t use the best resource to deal with children,” she said.

Richardson said the group is “in dire need” of raising $50,000 for a child-abuse investigation program that gathers neutral information in child-molestation cases. The program was sponsored last year through a state grant, and paid for an investigator who conducted 47 interviews in an eight-month period, she said.

However, funding for ICARE is more difficult to come by than funding for programs dealing with the aftermath of abuse.

“We’re not quite as glamorous because we don’t have people bleeding and bruised,” she said. “We try to prevent that.”

The fund-raiser will be held at 6 p.m. Friday at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. Advance viewing for the silent and live auction will begin at 5:30 p.m. Tickets are $45.

For information, call 676-1515.