http://www.invisiblechildren.org/our-book/

An informative & compelling look at the shameful treatment of vulnerable children, how it impacts our communities, and what we can do about it.

Listen, Read. Pass it on (a great gift).

This church often had many times the children they were able to care for…but they would not turn their communities children into the mean streets to be left on their own.  It was messy, it was stinky, and it was crowded, but it was safe.

Poor working families have no choices.

Thousands of names ahead of them on a list for subsidized day care that won’t provide help for years to come, means that any available family member, friend, or neighbor is considered a better option than leaving a three, five, or seven year old unattended (or is it?)

Leaving your child with that drunken or meth using uncle or aunt, the friend with the mental health issues, the dangerous or abusive teenager.  Children need and deserve better choices.

Choices that our communities are making it it harder and harder for poor people to make.   One of my guardian ad-Litem duties was to take children away from a father that could not afford daycare

It is a bigger step to convince people that healthy children become healthy citizens, but it is true.

• Support at risk children! Become a CASA volunteer or start a KARA group in your community.
• Have something to add? Attach a comment to this blog post or Contact Us to tell us your point of view or story.
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• Buy our book or listen to it (for free)
• Join the public debate for children (they have no senator, lobby, or voice)

Here is a sample of the 2008 Kids At Risk Action (KARA) Forum:

Have something to add?

Successful entrepreneur and author Mike Tikkanen combines his business acumen with his passion for neglected and abused children to offer answers to some of our communities most serious and complex problems.

Since 1996, he’s volunteered in the Guardian ad-Litem program as a court appointed special advocate (CASA). Mike has worked with about fifty “Invisible Children” that have become part of the County Child Protection System. Mike has become passionate about the madness that surrounds the treatment of abused and neglected children.

Learn the key issues facing abused and neglected children, what programs and policies work to improve their lives, and how you can be a better advocate for at risk children.

A public speaker on business for the past twenty years, Mike decided to bring public attention to what goes on behind closed doors and in the dark corners of our communities.  Mike recently held a workshop at the United Nations in New York, and has spoken at many conferences (Social Workers, Women’s Prison Wardens, Educators) and hundreds of business, community, and religious organizations.

Once you’ve heard Mike’s message on Invisible Children, you’ll never be the same. If you want a program that gets your audience thinking, you’ll call Mike Tikkanen. He guarantees a message filled with rock solid evidence, emotion, and ideas. Call him for Luncheons, breakouts, and keynotes.

Areas of Expertise:

Grassroots Change for At Risk Children
Supporting Education for All
Growing Healthy Families and Children

Simplifying the Mental Health Discussion

Mike’s Most Requested Programs:

The Impact of Abuse & Abandonment

(on Children & Communities)

Why Some Kids Don’t Learn in School

(and what it’s like to teach them)

Punishing Abused Children

(restorative justice vs more punishment)

Mental Health and Psychotropic Drugs For Children

(street drugs, big pharma, and therapy)

Economic Issues of Abuse and Neglect

(short term and long term costs and considerations)

A Local, National, and an International Perspective

(comparisons of quality of life and children’s issues between cities, states, and nations)

Testimonials:

“Mike encourages everyone to become aware of the critical issues impacting abused and neglected children.  After you hear him speak, you will ask yourself; what can I do to help?”,  Shirley Schroeder, Teacher, guardian ad-Litem, Mother, Grandmother

“A passionate, informative, and compelling look at the shameful treatment of vulnerable Children, how it impacts society, and what we can do about it. Tikkanen effectively mixes personal experience and real-life stories…”,  BurtBurlow, President Growing Communities For Peace

“It is truly critical for adults from all corners of our society to speak out on behalf of children, especially children without someone who cares about them and their futures…”, Connie Skillingstad, Executive Director Prevent Child AbuseMinnesota

“All children are born into a promise that the adults in their lives would take care of them. Unfortunately, that promise all too often gets broken and the only recourse these children have is a Child Protection System and Juvenile Justice System that certainly could use more help.”,  Minnesota State Senator, Mee Moua

“Open your ears to riveting and accurate stories of today’s children. Mike’s eye opening experiences encourage us all to reach out and make life better for troubled children in our communities”,  Donald Schmitz, Author and Founder of the Grandkids and Me Foundation ]]> http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2009/02/21/mike-tikkanen-speaker/feed/ 0 http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2009/02/21/mikes-next-speaking-engagements/ http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2009/02/21/mikes-next-speaking-engagements/#comments Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:04:14 +0000 Mike Tikkanen http://www.invisiblechildren.org/?p=417 Periodically I speak in public and record those upcoming events in this space.

I recommend calling groups to let them know if you wish to attend.

May 29 , 730 am Rotary Vescio’s St Louis Park MN   

Radisson Hotel Roseville at 2540 North Cleveland Avenue in Roseville, Minnesota.  Take the Cleveland Avenue South exit off 35W, go south on Cleveland to the hotel (Cleveland Avenue is parallel to 35W on the east side). I speak from 1 to 130pm. to attend please call 651/636-9054.  

May 26th, Eden Prairie Morning Rotary;

7:30 am on Tuesday mornings May 26th, at Biaggi’s at the Eden Prairie Center mall.  Rotary meeting with breakfast buffet.  

Call Scott H. Neal     952.949.8300

You have helped KARA begin and plan for a new year.

Best,

Mike Tikkanen

If you are interested in donating your vehicle to Kids At Risk Action (KARA), please visit our DONATE  page to learn how to do this via Cars with Heart.

Donate your vehicle to KARA via Cars with Heart

KARA's Mike Tikkanen at Prevent Child Abuse Minnesota's "Walk for Children"

KIDS AT RISK ACTION (KARA) members walked in Prevent Child Abuse Minnesota’s “Walk to Prevent Child Abuse” and gave our support to the Minnesota Children’s Platform.

Our 1st Annual KARA Forum, “Brutal Truths vs. Best Practices For At Risk Children,” was a big success. The forum was held at Century College and televised on local access. We are editing the broadcast to highlight some of the truly great moments of that conversation to share with media outlets and publish online.

We look forward to our revamped website and blog by designers, Lotus + Lama, in January 2009.

Melissa Thill, our Coordinator for Special Events and Donor Relations, is heading our grant-writing efforts, along with planning for spring and summer fundraisers, the 2nd KARA Forum, and lots of speaking opportunities for Mike Tikkanen.

Our first ever vehicle donation is in progress via Cars with Heart. We hope to see more donations like this in our future.

Please consider volunteering or making a donation in 2009. As we are an IRS 501(c)3 non-profit organization, all contributions to KIDS AT RISK ACTION (KARA) are tax deductible.

We at KARA, and the children that we help, thank you in advance for your generous and heartfelt support in 2009 – it is needed and most appreciated!

Instead of investing in reading for third graders (and early childhood education), California began investing in a third strike punishment model and building tens of thousands of prison beds.

Today, crime, courts, and incarceration are the largest piece of California’s state budget. The prison lobby is the largest lobby in the state, and California recidivism is above 70% (the highest in the world?)

The state now has the dubious distinction of spending more on prisons than on education and one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation

Former MN Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz and Marion Writght Edleman (Children’s Defense Fund Founder) have pointed out that almost all the youth in our juvenile justice system have come through chiild protection services and the vast majority of adults in the criminal justice system are graduates of our juvenile justice system.

Nationwide, about 25% of America’s youth are being tried in adult courts today. Once these youth are treated as adults in our court systems, they rarely leave the system. Juveniles are more likely to be raped and brutalized, and suicidal, than adults within the system (they are just more vulnerable).

California’s great investment in its criminal justice system has ruined tens of thousands of lives and paid very poor dividends to its citizens. It is horribly expensive, almost all the inmates recommit crimes within three years, and now they are letting the inmates out quickly because they are out of money to feed and house felons (let them rob and steal for their dinner).

The math is pretty straightforward:

X years and Y dollars of early childhood education/programs = children that can go to school and learn to read* graduate and build a meaningful life within our community. They go on to have jobs, raise normal families, and lead meaningful lives, versus

Spending those same dollars on prisons and punishment that has bought us recidivism, astronomical crime costs (1.5 to 2 trillion dollars annually) failed schools, and a persistent fear of walking home in our neighborhoods at night. What does forty years of social services and incarceration cost a community? What is the value of a healthy productive citizen?

This cycle will not be broken overnight. We will have to invest in programs that make children ready for school (it is a proven solid investment) and ready for life.

Our thirty year spree of “the floggings will continue until the Morale improves” policy making model has created more felons and mentally unhealthy people than any other nation in the world.

Are we able to change the direction of our public policies so that thirty years from now, all children will be valued as potential citizens and given access to health and education that are critical to participating in their community?

Minnesota has just experienced three consecutive years of double digit prison (investment) growth. Hennepin county arrested 44% of its black adult male population in 2001. Nationally, 13% of Black men can’t vote because they are felons. The racial disparity is clear to some of us.

After 12 active years in the County Child Protection system, I can testify that early childhood programs work as a deterent to crime and as a fiscally responsible means of running a county (or a state).

All children want to be happy creative beings. It is human nature. We can either facilitate this, and save tons of lives and money, or continue to build more crime and prisons and let our prisoners out early when we run out of money.

Support our effort to positively redefine the lives of at risk children, join our grassroots efforts and join one of the action / discussion groups you see on this website.   Make a difference in your community.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Tell us your story, comment, or perspective.  Think of someone you would like to send this to? Press the “share this” button below.

It pains me that this simple lesson in finance is so hard to comprehend for so many people.

One untreated, *traumatized” child can spend thirty or forty years in and out of institutions (child protection/juvenile justice/criminal justice), hurting themselves and others along the way.

Former MN Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz says that “the difference between that poor child and a felon, is about eight years”.

Most of these poor children becomes unhealthy adults and have their own poor children (now that’s exponential). Many preteen mothers have adolescent felon falthers with little hope of raising a happy or functional family. Recent studies show that almost 80% of children aging out of foster care are leading dysfunctional lives.

A recent ACE study proved that almost 70% of the serious and violent crime committed by juveniles in Ramsey County was committed by children living in 2 to 4% of Ramsey County families.

The economics of treating at risk children early is proven to be exponentially less costly than paying for the many years of institutionalization and the added encumbrance on our communities when they are not institutionalized.

Consider the burden these children place on our school systems. Few people outside of education have any idea about the serious behavior problems abused and neglected children bring to school. No record is kept of 9 year olds on psychotropic medications or the treatment they do not receive.

It can reasonably be argued that the approximately three million U.S. children reported to child protection services each year are passing through our public schools. Educators are required to manage a significant number of seriously troubled children while trying to bring meaningful instruction to large classrooms with less and less resources and public support each year.

For the last several years 25% of America’s graduating seniors have been functionally illiterate and our inner city high school dropout rate is approaching 50%.

On the world stage, we have fallen from our many years at the very top rank of all educational and qualitiy of life indices (among the 24 other **industrialized nations) to the very bottom in almost all of these measurements.

It is not educators or schools that have failed us. It is the unpreparedness, and serious problems brought to school by the millions and millions of troubled children that have overwhelmed our institutions.

In 2006 MN schools had 900 students per counsellor in its high schools. New Jersey removed all of its counsellors and mental health workers (all students needing help were sent to jail).

Under the NCLB almost all non “critical” programs have been forced out of our schools. Troubled youth find little help to deal with their serious problems (in 2005 MN had a total of 15 child psychiatrists).

The number of students unable to read by the third grade relates directly to and is a accurate predictor of high school dropout rates. Not graduating from high school is an accurate predictor of future criminal behavior.

Some states have predicted the need for future prison space by extrapolating from failed third grade reading scores. Minneapolis MN (Hennepin County) arrested 44% of its Black adult male population in 2001 (with no duplicate arrests).

America’s cost of prisons and jails has grown exponentially since the drug king pin laws and mandatory minimum sentencing guidlines were passed into law twenty years ago. The price tag for crime in the U.S. is estimated at between 1.1 and 1.6 Trillion dollars each year (insurance and incarceration cost figures).

It is pretty clear that helping each child cope with a troubled family life, learn to read, make friends, and become a functioning juvenile will add contributing members to our communities and save us millions of dollars (that is without calculating the very real costs of violence to our friends and families and our growing number of tortured inner city neighborhoods)

Can you help me to bring this message to a few more people so our policy makers can begin to understand the importance of supporting programs, people, and policies that help at risk children? 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is twice as common among children in child protection systems as it is among war veterans returning from Iraq.

**Those 24 nations with 200 year old democracies. Today we rank ourselves about in the middle of the 48 “emerging nations” instead of the much more accurate and meaningful “last” among the industrialized nations.

John was working too much (the fire repairs made them broke) and Mary was suffering from post partum depression.

The house fire required John to make quick repairs to accomodate the family until they could adequately rebuild. The house was messy because of this and Mary’s depression.

Mary called child services to get help.

Instead, the county removed their children from them a few weeks before Christmas (putting them in separate homes), and then fought with John and Mary for months to keep the children from returning home.   When the children were returned, it was one child at a time, visitation was made very difficult, and instead of helping the family get back on its feet, charged them $6000 in court costs.

The trauma experienced by these children during this process was terrible and it is still with them.

As a guardian ad-Litem, I have experienced this fear first hand. There is nothing more frightening to a child than to believe that mommy and daddy are gone. Young children do not understand court procedures and words don’t comfort.

Children experience real and long term pain and suffering as a result of this trauma. Removal from the birth home should never be taken lightly and children should receive professional help to deal with their trauma during and afterwards.

This family reached out for help to overcome a personal disaster and depression. Instead they were treated very badly.

This process did nothing for the benefit of the children or the home they live in. In fact, the $6000 court costs have set the family back even more, and the children will carry their PTSD type fears for years to come.

In my twelve years as a guardian ad-Litem I have worked with about fifty children and have never met a social worker that meant to hurt anyone, or act out of meanness.

Social work is complicated business that involves a great deal of knowledge across a broad spectrum of factors. Training and public policy are critical to the adminidstration of programs and methods that are meant to protect children.

Depression and poverty are a part of many lives in this nation and every nation.

Punishing people for human problems serves no one.   Calling what happened to this family child protection is a misnomer.   Child protection would have been to help this family solve it’s problems (not add to them).

“Defining our institutions by what they actually create instead of what they were designed to create“* would be the first step in making the changes necessary to fix our poorly understood and vastly under-resourced system.

It is only “We The People” that will bring attention to our dissatisfaction with public policies that need redirection and resources.

Not calling your state representatives and not voting won’t help.

Please submit your own stories to me and I will post those that fit on this website.

Get Active

*Quote from Kathleen Long, Author of Demons and Dragons

“WALKING THE TALK FOR CHILDREN” &

“WHY SOME CHILDREN DON’T LEARN IN SCHOOL”.

I forgot what gruelling work public speaking becomes as you enter the second ninety minute session (I had fifteen minutes between sessions).

By five pm I was worn out.

My presenting method has changed over the years to accomodate my conviction that learning takes place when participants become an active part of the discussion.   My secret for prompting worn out, after lunch crowds into a discussion is to hand out striking news articles on the topic that prompt an opinion or observation. It works.

The story that stuck with me the hardest came from a social worker.

She had reported severe and obvious child abuse at a home in her community on over a dozen separate occasions without any response from from child protection services (because there were no broken bones or bleeding and of course not enough resources in the community to deal with child abuse).

Some months later, one of her workmates noticed an emaciated dog on the premises of the abused child’s family, and told this conference attendee to report the emaciated dog.

She did.  After the humane society did its investigation, child protection services were referred in and the children were removed from the home.

That’s kinda how I see it too;  adults, pets, children, day care workers, fish and insects.

What’s it like in your community? (report the dog?)

Start this discussion with a group on this website and bring it into your community.  Change only comes when people like us start talking.

Onward and upward, 

the KARA team

The article is not on their website, but the above is a scan of the cover and below are scans of the article itself (click the images to enlarge.)

My new book, Invisible Children, was recently reviewed by Barbara Broom.

Here’s a quote:

The author packed the book with his passion and purpose: society’s involvement in children’ in abusive and dysfunctional homes’ foster care and the system in general. If you care about your community’s welfare, it is a “must read.”

Listen to the audiobook online (for free)

http://www.invisiblechildren.org/our-book/

What started out as three hundred pages of research notes, personal stories, and comments are now forged into 200 pages that are readable. Unlike this blog that seems to collect problems of the moment, the book sorts through issues and arranges them in an orderly fashion, and relates them to people, policy, and community.

The plan now is to get books to reviewers, media, and friends to see if it’s worthy of being read. Objectivity is hard. I’m heavily invested in the topic. The writing could always be improved, and I see now what I left out and how the book could have been clearer and made more impactful.

Oh well, perhaps next time.

If you have comments on the book, Please post them here.

See the book;

Children are not aware of the rightness or wrongness of their own abuse. They do not know that abuse is abnormal, or even that it is wrong. To a five-year-old, no matter how painful and frightening her life is, her life is normal. A sad and lasting fact of child abuse is that children blame themselves for the abuse they receive.

How can sex, drugs, and violence be unlearned by a ten year old child whose entire life has been just that? It takes years of therapy to change a child’s perception of an abusive past. It takes a great deal longer for an abused child to develop a healthy view of the world and a positive self-image. Our child protection systems don’t provide much therapy.

There is no book a child can go to, or code they are born with, that explains the abnormality of what is happening to them. Children can’t call their senators, or complain to the authorities (they can’t even tell their parents).

These children are invisible in our community, yet each one of us is directly responsible for their plight. They live under our laws; they go to our schools; they are convicted by our courts; many of them spend lifetimes in our prisons. They have no say in the laws and policies that rule their lives. Just like they had no say in the neglect and abuse that was their childhood.

Neglected and abused children make up a great majority of the crime, drugs, and violence we experience in our communities. Over fifty percent of the children in the juvenile justice system have diagnosable mental illness.

Ninety percent of the juveniles in the Juvenile Justice System have come out of the Child Protection System (Minnesota’s Chief Justice, Kathleen Blatz). Over 90 percent of the adults in the Criminal Justice System come out of the Juvenile Justice System. Justice Blatz (and others) call it a prison “feeder” system.

The United States is the only nation in the world to build prisons based on failed third grade reading scores.

Behaviors learned by abused children to stay alive in toxic homes are terribly counter-productive once the child is out of the abusive circumstances and trying to live a normal life. The behaviors developed for staying alive and avoiding pain dominate and thus can become significant detriments to getting along in society. As a matter of fact, for many troubled youth, their explosive responses and pain avoidance behaviors define them as social misfits and send them to prison.

There has got to be a better way to deal with abused and abandoned children in our communities.

A special national Swat team of psychologists has been flown into Red Lake to deal with grieving students.

In a few weeks the TV and Newspaper coverage will die down and we will go on to the next tragedy and repeat the process.

It pains me that there are no serious discussions about the mental health issues that create these violent tragedies or the steps that could be taken to help seriously troubled children cope with their problems.

As a long time guardian ad-Litem I see the sadness, depression, and mental health issues that seriously affect so many children. Our culture does not recognize or help these kids.  While psychotropic medications are everywhere, the kind of therapy that makes a difference is sadly lacking.  I have not seen it in any of the cases I have worked on at Hennepin county.

I have two GAL children who have been with me for over six years (Alex and Nancy). I profile their lives in my book INVISIBLE CHILDREN.

Had my young friends received mental health counseling when they were young, they might have been able to lead normal lives. Instead, they are full of self-loathing and dangerous behaviors, prescribed Class II stimulant drugs (like Prozac), and they have both tried suicide. In these respects, they are just like Jeff Weiss.

Jeff let many people know his homicidal/suicidal thoughts.  There was simply no help available for a very troubled young man.  The suffering of the living will go on for many years.  If you know anyone that has lost a loved one to violence you will understand this.  

How a little care might have prevented this awful tragedy could be a lesson.  I am always hopeful.

Have something to add?

We both have roots to Floodwood MN where my Finnish grandparents let me stay with them on the farm each summer when I was a boy (instead of getting in trouble with my pals in the inner city.)

One of the things Tom and I spoke of was the sense of warmth and community that existed growing up in a rural community.

Powerful feelings divide us within our communities today and impact the way we vote to treat our neighbors (education, race,  social safety nets.)

I find it painful that Councilman Don Samuels is kept busy holding vigils for murdered young men (almost every week) on the North side.

It hurts me that so few people care that Roosevelt high school graduated 28% of its students last year, or know that 44% of African American men living in Hennepin County were arrested in 2001.

How disconnected can we become?

What do you feel when a baby is found dead in a dumpster, a young person deliberately murders innocent people, or some other insane tragedy fills the headlines?

Do you feel a sense of loss and sadness for the suffering of the parties involved?

Or are you filled with judgment and a need to blame someone and a desire for punishment?

Have something to add?

He has taught me many lessons.  He was such a charming little boy.   He won 2nd place at an inner city high school talent show not long ago.   He has verbalized his self- hatred and tried to kill himself more than once.

A cute little girl I have worked with for many years has genital warts and a strong desire to have a baby. She has no parenting skills (nor a viable grasp of reality.)

She is fourteen and I don’t see how things could be different. The court put her on long-term birth control when she was eleven. She had just escaped ST Joe’s home for children and seduced a man at a bar.

People in the business of child protection know that traumatized children do poorly with their peers, fail in school, and suffer severe anxieties and social failures.

Helping abused children back into the role of student, citizen, or any other functioning member of the community our policies must replace (or integrate) psychotropic medications with specific and extensive mental health therapies.

Does anyone know the number of current county ward children prescribed psychotropic medications? I think it is more than we can imagine. The national number (total) of kids on psychotropic drugs is at least 6 million.

The model we use today (drugs without adequate therapy) saves a little money on the front end.

By denying the need for services we guarantee ourselves many years of state support for damaged children—who then become troubled juveniles, becoming dysfunctional adults that commit crimes and visit their mental illnesses upon their own progeny (who repeat the cycle.)

It would be a useful exercise to calculate the costs of adequately treating traumatized children versus letting them become dysfunctional adolescents, pregnant teenagers and criminals.  80% of youth aging out of foster care lead dysfunctional lives.

It causes me great pain to watch these children continue to hurt themselves and the others around them.

I’m certain that community investment in troubled youth is a sound investment.  It also strikes me that any nation that values children would find a way to invest in children.

Have something to add?