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Where Do Kids Go When Parents Are Addicted?
A local Vermont newspaper ran an incredibly touching obituary for a young woman, just two years younger than me, who finally succumbed to her addiction to opioids. Her father wrote the obituary, and explained how her addiction came to pass,
Megan grew up in St. Albans and Georgia, Vt., participating in dance and swimming. She proved to be an adventuresome reader and a fearless jumper off cliffs. But on July 1, 2005, she was once again at a cliff on Eagle Bay in Burlington. I was sitting at my desk on the first day of a new job, and a Vermont State Policeman called to tell me to drive to the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center. I was told that she had been pushed off the cliffs and hit the rocks below … with her face. Having been rescued by a man in a kayak and EMTs, she was being stitched up, and her jaw was wired shut. They suspected a TBI, but when they prescribed her liberal doses of opiates, she lost control of her life. She would be in and out of rehab — and jail — for the next 14 years.
On the campaign trail in 2016, Chris Christie told a similar story about a friend who was prescribed opioids for pain and watched his life unravel.
My father was addicted to drugs my entire life, and just when (I think) he became clean, he was prescribed opioids for pain related to an injury, and he fell right back down the rabbit hole. I am sympathetic and familiar with addiction as a result, but in the Vermont obituary, I felt extremely conflicted about what came next,
To editorialize, I am hoping that the Department for Children and Families rethinks its mission to be the punisher of addicted mothers, the separator of families and the arbiter of children’s futures, and instead embrace a mission of enhanced rehabilitation. We, as a state, are overwhelmed by addiction. We have almost nowhere to turn. I encourage enhanced funding for treatment in general and using DCF as a gateway for mothers with addiction to get help. Because, as one would guess, once the mother is separated from her children, desperation sets in, even with the brightest and most determined of mothers — and Megan Angelina Webbley was that bright and determined mother … with a fatal disease and a dearth of treatment options.
Speaking as the daughter of an addict, I strongly disagree that this is the role of a child services agency. The job of social workers is to ensure the safety of children being raised in dangerous households. The children of addicts are not responsible for saving their parents. The one and only consideration social workers should be making when deciding if a child should remain in a household is the safety of the child.
While the physical presence of a child can motive a parent to get clean, at what cost?
According to the “ACE” quiz of childhood trauma, trauma that can impact a child for the rest of their lives, substance abuse is one of the most damaging situations a child can encounter. Along with substance abuse often comes other kinds of trauma, including neglect, incarceration and all kinds of abuse.
While we should absolutely hope that ultimately families can find a way to stay together, this parent-centric focus of care suggested by a grieving and well-meaning father, and practiced in the offices of many child-welfare agencies, would have lasting implications for future generations.
Published in General
We would all be better off if more people had a sophisticated understanding of this issue. It destroys human and financial capital.
I was prescribed a very small amount of Demerol after eye surgery. The way that stuff improve your mood is absolutely mind blowing. Extremely scary, IMO.
The topic of improving the prescribing of opioids is very complex.
This is such a topic of huge importance, I wish it would get more attention. It seems entire generations are being lost or crippled by drugs and alcohol – and the fallout is generational. There seems to be no one touched by these terrible lifestyles. My sister’s job is social services and the bad stories for a small town are shocking, not to mention the rest of what she describes is now the norm of this scenic mountain town – drug addicts, young teens pimping, multi-gender kids begging for money (boys wearing skirts), grandparents raising grand kids, it’s Orwellian! I’ve witnessed the lifelong challenges of kids raised by addicted parents – it’s a constant struggle.
Why would someone push this girl off a cliff and why jump off them? That was dumb. But the opiates issue needs to be addressed as a major epidemic, like the plague! It’s killing and ruining lives.
Come again?
Like you said, Bethany – DCF doesn’t exist to be the ‘punisher of addicted mothers’. It exists (or should exist) to protect children.
I am sorry for the loss that her dad experienced. Unfortunately his prescription is more harm than good.
As to opiates – I think that we have come a long way with pain management – I don’t think going backward is very helpful.
I agree with you, Bethany. Children only have eighteen years in which to do their growing, and though we can’t fix everything, we can at least do our best to be sure that they are physically safe and looked after.
Treatment programs for addictions need to be more available but also much longer-term, including long-term (six months, a year or more) of in-patient treatment. It’s not enough to “detox.” An addict may have underlying mental illnesses and need medication for these which are best administered and adjusted under safe conditions. Addicts often have has to re-learn how to live, think, function and love—it’s hard work rebuilding yourself from the ground up.
I know too many addicts who will say they owe their lives to going to jail, because jail (and/or intensive parole with conditions) gave them the external control and support they needed for sufficient time.
20+ years ago my husband and I decided to adopt a child from the DHS – foster-to-adopt. We went to one of the orientation meetings and were told in no uncertain terms that the agency was in the business of reuniting parents with their children. In other words, we weren’t to get too starry-eyed about adopting a child because they were hoping to replace the kid with the birth parent if at all possible. And I guess that’s better than having the idea that you’re going to do all you can to rip the child away from the parent, but most of the kids in foster care have very sad family situations. At another orientation meeting, we were told that if the county were to take kids away from parents for casual drug use they wouldn’t know what to do with all the kids they’d have.
We went to one of the orientation meetings and were told in no uncertain terms that the agency was in the business of reuniting parents with their children. In other words, we weren’t to get too starry-eyed about adopting a child because they were hoping to replace the kid with the birth parent if at all possible.
I encountered the same thing. Personally, I can’t stand county adoption programs. One “delightful” comment from a county adoption worker was not to “get my hopes up” about adopting a child that wasn’t white because “like goes with like.” Another was that pretty much any child they gave us would beat up my daughter with Down syndrome at the first opportunity. Every step out the way the county agency did anything they could to make the process discouraging, disheartening, cynical, and dehumanizing.
In short: your government at work.
So instead we’ve been raising a foster daughter for the last three years under a private agreement with her family, who’ve made my wife and I her legal guardians. I make no attempt to keep her from her biological family; in fact, I encourage her to spend time with them whenever possible. Partly this is because they are a family in tragic free fall – two of them have died in the last year – and she’ll only have so much time to spend with them. But also because foster parenting is, well, parenting. And parenting isn’t about you. It’s never about you. It’s always about the children. Always. And children need to feel loved by as much family as is possible, even if they aren’t all perfect.
(And my foster daughter has always been loving and kind toward my daughter with Down syndrome, right down to watching like a hawk at school for bullying.)
Anyone “jumping off cliffs” already has an addiction, to adrenaline, and is an opiate addict waiting to happen.
I see a lot of patients in the ER who were into “extreme sports” (20 somethings think they are immortal) and when they get hurt bad as a goodly number do, there is a strong chance the opiates we prescribe initially for their pain are going to be their next addiction.
I’m from Vermont, grew up about 30 minutes south of that St. Albans town, and my brother and his family spent the last 20 years or so there. He and his wife and one of his daughters moved to California this year, for a new gig, so there’s very little footprint left in that town for them, but the issues there are real.
It’s the same in a lot of small towns, but I think it hits home more because it’s easier to connect with someone, a face, people you see from the grocery store or school recitals or basketball games. It becomes more real than just statistics.
DCF is in a perpetual no-win situation, which I have sympathy for, but how they work and often the people who work in those gigs, the court system, basically it’s a big giant mess. In terms of getting children removed from dangerous situations, in the short run it might be easy (relatively), but longer-term placement and care for children, if they are removed, parental rights terminated, and then placed into foster care, adoption, placement with another family member, etc, is itself yet another big giant mess.
If a child is lucky, there’s family, family that hasn’t also self-destructed through substance abuse. That’s a big “if”, though. Since this type of issue has super-fun genetic components, odds are pretty good that it “runs in the family”, so a DCF might have a limited set of options for initial placement, and longer-term placement/adoption.
Opiods. Booze. Pot. You name it. Humans like it. They often love it. If an individual isn’t willing to address their own issues, if they devolve into addiction, all the rest is just how we pick up the pieces resulting from their choices, which means it’ll always be a “least worst” type of choice.
I’m sorry you had that experience. We ended up adopting three kids, not our race, and the social workers were really cool about it, in fact, one of the social workers was black and the other was ethnic Chinese. We had four older biological (hate that descriptor, but hate “kids of our own” even more) children. We often heard comments like “you could never do that in LA country.” Families come in all colors!