I’m now hated by one of the children I was best friends with as a guardian ad-Litem. She wants to be reconnected with her mother (which I agree with) and have her younger siblings moved back into her mother’s care (which I don’t agree with). This will be my fourth court battle with her mother (over seven children).

She and I met ten years ago at a court hearing that placed her out of the home when she was seven years old because her (crack addict) mother’s lover had been sexually abusing her (for about four years) and had once kicked her so hard she went into convulsions.

She has been on Prozac, Ritalin, and other psychotropic medications without any serious or long-term therapy pretty much her entire childhood.

Just a reminder to the rest of us what it’s like for a seven year old (3, 5,7, 11) to take the long ride to St. Joe’s Home for Children, not knowing if mommy will ever get well enough to tell me she loves me and hug me like she used to.

There is no terror greater than being taken out of the only home she has ever known; from the only people she has ever known, to be cast into a busy, unfamiliar place like St. Joe’s.

If we were honest, we would add, that all of Minnesota’s emergency mass care homes for abandoned children have a similar bizarre atmosphere.

The air is filled with the powerful emotional and mental health issues being dealt with by abandoned children and well-meaning, overwhelmed people barely able to keep their charges from hurting themselves.

My young (one-time) friend has moved into a dozen new homes over these ten years, knowing that no one loved her and feeling strange and different from all the other children in her home, or in her school, or on her block.

I will never forget the fear she showed when I drove her from the courthouse to St. Joe’s home for children. That fear has been with her for ten years and it is with her still, constantly.

You could say that her fear defines her as a person, as she makes all her irrational decisions based on fear and anxiety (almost all her decisions are irrational).

I believe that this child deserved better treatment than she received at the hands of our community. I also believe that our community would have spent less money, and been better served if it had provided this child better treatment.

Recommended parenting Techniques
To improve Attachment

The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) recently released findings that are endorsed by the American Psychological Association regarding Reactive Attachment Disorder and attachment therapies. A task force formed by APSAC reported that there are many non-controversial interventions designed to improve attachment quality that are based on accepted theory and use generally supported techniques.

Among the caregiver qualities the APSAC recommended that support the development of healthy attachment are:

 Environmental stability
 Parental sensitivity
 Responsiveness to children’s physical and emotional needs
 Consistency
 A safe and predictable environment

According to the findings, improving positive caretaker and environmental qualities is the key to improving attachment. Calling upon traditional attachment theory, the report emphasized that children who are characterized as having attachment problems require a stable environment with parents taking “a calm, sensitive, non-intrusive, non-threatening, patient, predictable, and nurturing approach.”

The APSAC task force members went on to say that “because attachment patterns develop within relationships, correcting attachment problems requires close attention to improving the stability and increasing the positive quality of the parent-child relationship and parent-child interactions.” According to a review of more than 70 studies of interventions designed to improve early childhood attachment, the interventions that most increased parental sensitivity were also the most effective in improving children’s attachment security

Used by permission of Sage Publications from Child Maltreatment, Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2006.
Sage Publications, Inc.
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, CA 91320-2218
805-499-0721, ext. 7735 FAX: 805-499-0871
www.sagepub.com

Economic Security was the topic of the most recent Hamline University Dialogue ((4/20/06).

It was remarkable to hear Art Rolnick (Fed Reserve Board Chairman), Chris Farrell (Chief Economics correspondent American RadioWorks), and Jenny Keil (Associate Professor of Management and Economics at Hamline) relate the economic security of our nation to the education and well being of children.

There is a very real value to fostering a healthy population of citizens that can obtain an education, earn a living and take care of themselves and their families. In fact, it has been argued that it was the effectiveness of America’s educational institutions during the 1950s that made it’s population the most productive in the world.

The panel brought our attention to the very real cost to a community of children born into toxic, violent, drug using, abusive families. Mental and physical health problems explode into long term illnesses that keep at risk children from leading normal lives.

Instead of healthy productive children, untreated at-risk children become unable to cope with peers, their community, or at school and become more and more dysfunctional as they get older. For many years now our courts have been sending more children into the Juvenile Justice System and about twenty five percent of the Juvenile Justice youth into the Criminal Justice system.

Statistically, more than half of those children and youth are being diagnosed with mental health problems, their criminal recidivism rates are high, and their long term potential for remaining in the court system, jails, and prisons has reached an all time high.

It’s expensive to maintain a child through years of Child Protection services, more years of Juvenile Justice, and if they graduate to Criminal Justice, it is often a life sentence of recidivism (66% is the national average in America’s prison system). It cost almost $80,000 to maintain a prisoner at Stillwater Prison last year.

The smart money treats the child effectively at the first opportunity. It saves us money, breaks the cycle of family abuse,(healthy children have healthy families) and a human being.

Mike T
guardian ad-Litem www.invisiblechildren.org

Boston’s Catholic Charities to halt adoptions (Star Tribune 3.11.2006) because of the churches concern with sexuality issues.

There are not nearly enough loving adoptive homes for the multitude of waiting children.

Because of budget cuts, war, and some would argue, misplaced priorities, state and federal programs to help at risk children are in jeopardy all across America.

Almost all the East Coast states have been plagued with examples of inadequate child protection services and sad stories about abused and neglected children being ignored or abused again by systems that are only partially supported by the institutions designed to protect them.

There are three million children reported as abused annually in this nation. About one million children enter child protection services. The number would be almost twice as high if the standards of Minnesota’s 1999 child abuse statute had remained and been implemented nationally.

In my work as a child court advocate (guardian ad-Litem) I have formed the conviction that gay and lesbian couples are extraordinarily well suited for adopting abused children.

They, more than heterosexual couples, know the turmoil and anxiety of feeling “different” and what it’s like to be judged by something you cannot change. They know what it’s like to feel self-loathing.

Behavior problems and mental health issues accompany abused and neglected children into their adoptive homes.

Children removed from their birth homes have been traumatized twice; once (usually over years) for the abuse that happened in the home, and then again as they proceed through the process of being removed from the home and through the legal proceedings that place them in foster and adoptive homes. It’s a frightening process for anyone. You should see what it’s like for a seven-year old. The experience will stay with you.

I would ask the church to spend one day with a teenager that has been on the adoptive waiting list for a longer than normal period of time and get to know the child’s issues.

Then, interview a gay or lesbian couple and see if you can perceive the enhanced sensitivity and understanding that I believe they offer an abused child.

This exercise will also make it easier for Catholics to understand the terrific need abused children have for bonding and for love and the ability of gay and lesbian couples to provide it.

Ending all adoption work for abandoned children in Boston because a gay or lesbian couple might adopt and denying all abused and neglected children this supremely important part of life because of outdated church doctrine is wrong. Is this what the church wants to be known for?

reprinted from Sunday, February 12, 2006 (SF Chronicle)

One Child, One Therapist/An innovative program partners foster children with therapists for as long as they’re needed, providing a stability otherwise missing
Rob Waters

When child psychologist Norman Zukowsky first met him, 6 1/2-year-old “William” had already lived through more hardship and trauma than many people experience in a lifetime.

He was born exposed to drugs and alcohol,one of three children of a drug-addicted mother who lived in an unheated garage with no cooking or bathroom facilities.

Child welfare reports suggest that the children were physically abused, exposed to sexual behavior and often went without food or clothing. Eventually, William was
removed from his mother’s care only to be placed with a relative who scarred his chest beating him with a belt.

Then William finally caught some breaks. When he was 5, he and his 7-year-old sister were placed with Mrs. Smith (not her real name), a loving, attentive foster mother who ran a stable, orderly home.

Under her influence, he began to settle down and shed some of his wildness and anxiety. One year later, Zukowsky became his volunteer therapist through an innovative San Francisco program called the Children’s Psychotherapy Project.

For the next two years, Zukowsky and William saw each other once a week, usually at the therapist’s San Francisco office but sometimes at Smith’s tidy blue house. Zukowsky saw in William an endearing, charming boy who was hungry for adult friendship and connection.

They spent most of their hour-long sessions playing cards, board games and improvised baseball using paper wads and pencils. “He made the rules … he kept score, and he always won … repeatedly, inevitably, and — in my clinical view –necessarily,” Zukowsky wrote in a chapter of a recent book about the psychotherapy project.

William was playing “developmental catch-up,” Zukowsky wrote, seeking and getting from his therapist the warmth, attention and emotional nourishment he had missed in his earliest years.

Things were going well for William. He had fallen in love with his foster mother, who was in the process of adopting William and his sister. He adored Zukowsky. And he was doing well in school.

Then, one horrible night, William’s life crumbled again. Mrs. Smith’s husband, a depressed, quiet man who rarely interacted with the children, shot his wife and himself. William and his sister found their bodies and lost the only stable, loving home they had ever known.

Zukowsky was now the key adult in William’s life, the one person he could
count on, and who was truly looking out for his needs. Zukowsky was in that position because 12 years ago San Francisco psychologist Toni Heineman got mad about the many ways the child welfare system fails foster children — and decided to do something about it.

Heineman had worked with foster children for many years and had learned firsthand how the system sabotages the ability of foster children to form lasting relationships with caring adults.

“We send foster kids from home to home, community to community and case worker to case worker,” says Heineman, an associate clinical professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at UCSF. “It’s the biggest problem in the system.”

The system’s failings take a heavy toll. A recent report from Casey Family
Programs, a foster care agency, found that former foster youth now in their 20s and early 30s suffer from staggering rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems; high rates of unemployment, homelessness and poverty; and low rates of college and vocational school completion.

Heineman realized that revolving therapists were part of the problem. Foster children who get therapy usually are seen by interns who rotate every few months to get diverse experience. Just as a child forms an attachment with a therapist, she explains, the therapist leaves and the child is once again abandoned.

To address this problem, Heineman and a group of colleagues founded the Children’s Psychotherapy Project, which recruits therapists to spend one hour a week working with a foster child.

The guiding principle is simple: “One child, one therapist, for as long as it takes.” The project asks for a long-term commitment from the therapists it recruits, but it also gives something back: In addition to their one-hour session with a foster youth, each volunteer therapist also participates in a weekly consultation group led by a veteran clinician.

These groups, which therapists might normally pay to attend, allow colleagues working with children to come together, discuss cases and get advice and support from each other.

After Mrs. Smith was murdered, Zukowsky’s consultation group became a crucial source of support for him as he mourned her death and its impact on William. “I was sustained by the emotional sharing” of the group, he wrote.

Zukowsky’s role in William’s life was now more critical than ever. He comforted William, worked his connections in the welfare system and strategized with the therapist working with William’s sister, also a project volunteer. When they resumed their sessions, a subdued William continued to want to play — and did not want to talk about his foster mother’s death. Zukowsky followed his lead, rarely bringing up Mrs. Smith’s death.

William eventually recounted the story of finding the bodies, the shock and sorrow playing briefly over his face. Eventually, William brought up the question Zukowsky had been dreading: Perhaps, the boy asked, they could live together. Zukowsky awkwardly explained that would be impossible, and William let it go.

Today, two years after Mrs. Smith’s death, William and his sister are again living in a stable home. William is now 10, and he continues to see Zukowsky once a week for sessions of indoor basketball mixed with a bit of talk. Zukowsky is guarded and self-effacing when he talks about William and his impact on one boy’s life. But this much, he will say: “In a psychological sense, I was family. We shared a loss, and he had someone to lean on.”

The Children’s Psychotherapy Project, meanwhile, has gone national. From its start in San Francisco, the project has spawned 12 chapters in cities around the country.

More than 100 therapists are donating their time and more than 200 foster children have been served. In a system that, on any given day, includes some 500,000 children nationwide, that number is a drop in the bucket. Heineman keeps on working to recruit more therapists and serve more children. But whatever the numbers, she believes the program has an impact beyond the individual children served.

“When we make a difference in the life of one foster kid, it also has an impact on the system,” she says. “It’s small and it’s subtle, but over time, it adds up and people begin to think about the importance of long-term relationships in the lives of foster youth in a different way.”

Freelance writer Rob Waters is a recipient of a 2005-2006 Rosalynn Carter
Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. ———————————————————————-
Copyright 2006 SF Chronicle

State must make early childhood investments a priority

KELLY DORAN

During a speech in Hong Kong near the end of his China trade mission late last year, Gov. Tim Pawlenty expressed his amazement at the “scope” of China’s rise to economic superpower status. Then, in an apparent moment of sober revelation, Pawlenty reportedly proclaimed that it is about time “for our country to get its rear in gear.”

It’s hard to imagine how Minnesota’s governor could be so seemingly blindsided by what business leaders and policy experts have been warning of throughout the past several years — the global economy is on the move, and in order to maintain our competitive edge and grow Minnesota’s economy, we need to have a vision for our future that includes investing in education like never before, in particular early childhood education.

If there is one direction in education toward which Minnesota should move, it is reforming our education system and ensuring every child in Minnesota has at least one year of education before entering kindergarten. Study after study has proven that early childhood education is an almost guaranteed way to ensure greater success later in life.

Whether our goal is to increase the graduation rate of our high school seniors, close the achievement gap between white students and students of color, or increase the number of our high school graduates who go on to earn a college degree, there is no greater investment we can make than in early childhood education. According to recent studies, investments in early childhood education can even lead to less crime and decreased welfare payments.

Leaders across the country are taking note. Take a drive down Interstate 35 to Iowa, where the governor and Legislature have dedicated more than $75 million for early childhood initiatives over two years. Head further south, and Arkansas’ Republican governor has passed two tax increases for such an investment, while two other conservative states — Oklahoma and Georgia — provide free state-paid preschool for every 4-year-old child.

Here at home, Art Rolnick of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, hardly a liberal think tank, touts investments in early childhood education and insists such spending offers the greatest return on investment available to government.

Yet, unfortunately, under Pawlenty’s administration, support for early childhood education initiatives like Head Start has been cut by many millions of dollars. And though early childhood education has both proven results and unparalleled returns, we now dedicate only 0.5 percent of our state budget toward this investment. If the CEO in the business world suggested investing such a minuscule amount in a proven high-rate-of-return investment, he or she would be fired.

In the meantime, as the governor and lawmakers gear up for the new year and new session, debates about whether to extend the school year and reorganize how we pay teachers have occupied our public discourse. And while these are fine debates worth having, we need to have a broader debate and ensure we are building the necessary foundation for our children to be successful and seize the opportunities of a global economy.

What the governor witnessed in China was a society that has a clear vision, is focused on its future, and has made purposeful and unprecedented investments in education infrastructure. China has more than doubled its number of college students in the past five years to 14 million, the most in the world. It is producing eight times as many graduate engineers as the U.S. Chinese government officials recently announced to business leaders around the world that the country will significantly increase its investment in education as a percentage of the country’s GDP.

China’s potential to overtake the American economy is real, and it could happen in our lifetime if we don’t prepare our children and our economy for what lies ahead and ensure we can compete.

A Chinese proverb reads, “The person who doesn’t worry about the future will soon be worrying about the present.” It’s time to set aside politics and do the right thing.

Doran of Eden Prairie is a DFL candidate