Interview with Dr. Kerby Alvy
By Nazneen Malik
Dr. Kerby Alvy, Founder and Executive Director of the Center
for the Improvement of Child Caring (CICC), an organization
dedicated to helping children through effective parenting,
fell in love with children when he was just a child himself.
The youngest of five siblings, Alvy became an uncle at age
nine and soon discovered that he enjoyed being in the presence
of “littler people.” This realization has been
the underlying motivation behind the choices he has made throughout
his life; and his love of children continues to fuel his ambitions
towards increasing the size and scope of community and national
involvement in his parenting programs.
As an undergradutate at UCLA, Alvy majored in political science
with the intention of pursuing law; however, when he graduated,
he was unsure about which professional path to tread. He had
gained much experience working with children as a coach at
the YMCA and felt a natural ease when dealing with them. This
facility prompted him to accept a position as a probation counselor
at juvenile hall in Los Angeles. “This was the first
time I came into contact with children who were seriously abused
and neglected. Some were waiting to go to mental institutions,
or the youth authority. These were kids that the community
had failed,” says Dr. Alvy. He was surprised to find
young children around the ages of six and seven among the crowd. “It
was a very bracing experience, and it started to orient me
towards working with these kids, and I was very good at it,” he
admits.
Giving up a promotion within the Probation Department, Alvy
decided he needed more training to deal with the problems he
was encountering. At 23, he went back to college for a second
undergraduate degree—this time in psychology. He eventually
obtained admission into a doctoral program at The State University
of New York at Albany and received the first Ph.D. in clinical
psychology that the university had ever offered.
“After I got my doctorate I had an opportunity to work
in a lot of institutions in LA,” says Alvy, “I
had a very strong commitment to social justice.”
As the Head of Childrens’ Services at the Kedren Community
Mental Health Center in south LA, Alvy had the opportunity
and the means to develop his ideas about how to rectify and
prevent childhood abuse and neglect. At the Center he conducted
family therapy and realized that the root cause of most of
the problems families were having was communication. Parents
failed to show adequate appreciation of their children when
they did something good. “That is when I started to get
interested in parent training,” says Alvy.
Alvy applied for and received a grant for the community mental
health center to train people in the community to become child-parent
mental health workers. “We started training parents and
at the same time I realized that the training of parents is
not supported as the maor part of any institution in our society
like in the mental health center it’s an adjunctive or
an outreach service it’s not an essential service and
in education it’s nested under adult education. In other
programs it was never a priority and that’s when it dawned
on me that some institution had to stand for the training and
education of parents as the best way to help kids.”
With help from his brother and like-minded psychologists,
Alvy began to develop what would eventually become the CICC.#
