Professional resources

I was recently introduced to a lady who works as a counselor through our school district to provide support to children whose parents are incarcerated or in and out of jail. My nephew's school teacher had learned about her and new of our situation. She talked to the Principal who contacted the counselor at the school district.

I met with this counselor about a week ago in the Principal's office. She talked with me about our situation and told me what they could offer by way of help for these kids in our care. Before our meeting was over I had found a valuable resource.

This lady had the experience of working with prisoners and the training to understand what is best for the kids. I found that she could truly understand what we are going through.

I was told that she would be there for me as well as for the kids. She added that they have an entire network of people who can work with these kids.

At the end of our interview I wanted to hug her for all its worth. It was as if a major burden had been lifted. I finally had someone to turn to who could answer questions that had yet to be answered. There was light at the end of the tunnel.

Stigma Vs. Appeal

We have in our state the Utah Methampheteamine Joint Task Force whose job is to reduce the use of meth across the state. They're using the Montana Meth Project as an example of a successful program that has done well with its own stated goals of:

1. Increase the perceived risks of meth use
2. Decrease the perceived benefits of meth
3. Increase parent-child discussions on meth
4. Increase the social disapproval of meth use

Now for the question of the day. How do we increase the social disapproval of drug abuse in order to reduce the number of new users, while still not stigmatizing existing users so they are more reluctant to come forward for treatment?

I think I've got a pretty good handle on the first three personally, but that fourth one can be tricky. Where's the balance? Can people be made to think it's a vile habit and exert peer pressure to avoid meth without making users more afraid to get the help they need? Do we just sacrifice a few current users in order to scare away those who haven't started yet? Quite a moral conundrum.

Free Lunch

Sometimes there is such a thing as a Free Lunch. Cathy Free writes for the Deseret News here in the Salt Lake City area. A couple of weeks back, she met with my wife for lunch (hence the Free Lunch name) to discuss our story and how we're learning about the resources available to those who care for the children of others.

I am normally wary of news reporters of all sorts because of how badly I've seen stories mangled for the sake of adding hype to draw readers, but both my wife and I have respect for Cathy based on reading her past articles. A short visit during lunch can hardly do to learn such a complicated story in depth, but the story as told is pretty close.

Kelly's goal from the meeting wasn't to show off or stand in the spotlight. She's not like that. The thought would horrify her. Our hope is that the article will raise awareness of the issues we're going through, and to help those who are lost in the sea of questions as they raise the children of relatives, or are forced to deal with the fallout of drug addiction.

When they hear of us raising the nieces and nephew, lots of people say "I could never do that." Given the choice of seeing children tossed into a life of poverty and drug abuse, or taking them in and raising them as your own, it's a choice I think many people could make. It's a choice many do make. For some, there's no option but to do it. Give yourself some credit for what you would do when there doesn't seem to be a good alternative.

Edit: A recovered addict (Thanks for the email, J.D.) was concerned about what looked like a really harsh attitude toward drug addicts in the intro to the article, and that it wasn't a productive way of portraying the issue. Kelly and I agree completely, and it was simply a case of the conversation not being transcribed as accurately as it could have been. Reading the rest of the entries we've posted here should give a much more clear view of our attitudes and efforts.

Six Ways to Spin Bad News

It can be tough to tell children that one or both parents are in jail. It can generate a lot of hard feelings. We got asked a lot of "whys" last week. My wife had to explain to our nine year old nephew that the police are still the good guys, even though they arrested both his mom and dad and sent them to jail. Here are some ways to ease the hurt when you need to break the news.

1. It's the best place for them to take care of their legal problems. They won't miss any court appearances because they will have someone in charge of making sure they show up. They can't forget, they don't need to find transportation, and they will be getting constant encouragement to resolve things, even if they're spread across multiple jurisdictions.
2. It's a good place to get into rehab. Availability of rehab programs has been improving as the scope of the drug problem has become more public. If nothing else, it's an enforced detox. They've got a better shot at getting into rehab if it's part of the reason they're in jail. Some people when out on their own just don't quite seem to find the time, or don't like a particular program, or want to find something that's just right. In jail, they have much less flexibility, but much more schedule and direction.
3. We know where they are. It's possible to write letters and send pictures and know they'll get delivered.
4. Arrests can greatly speed up the resolution of cases. They'll be out on their own without being a fugitive when they're done. Justice is a good thing. When we do what we should, it protects us. When we don't do what we should, it protects others from us, and helps us to change. It's not just about punishment.
5. They won't be out breaking the law and creating more legal cases. The worst they can do in jail is manufacture contraband from the minimal supplies they have on hand. Sure, one could get into a lot of trouble while in jail, but it's a whole lot easier outside than inside.
6. Birthday and Christmas shopping are greatly simplified. This may sound flippant, but it actually came up with us. The kids pooled some allowance money, and their dad later told them what he had bought as their Christmas presents to him. All you need to do is put some money on their commisary account, and they can buy their own things from the allowed list. No need to wonder what it is they need the most, since that choice is taken away from you for the most part. One exception that is allowed locally is that a publisher can send books directly to an inmate. Once they're done reading it, the book goes into a library for other inmates to use.

Some of these items will be more comforting than others. Some might not apply in your case, but for us it helps to have a list when talking with the kids. It helps them feel informed. They deserve to know how things are going, and how they can be involved whether through calls, letters, or visits. Also remember that one size does not fit all. Each child will react differently. Our five year old niece for instance was overheard just over a year ago talking to one of her friends at church in a cheerful tone of complete innocence, "No, really! My daddy is in jail."

Getting Financial Help

At the time we were awarded custody (guardianship) of the other children in our home we felt that we would be able to provide for them with the financial means that we have. We also felt that if we went to the State for financial assistance (which is available in some states) that the State would go to the parents for child support. We felt that this would be much like bleeding a turnip. We just didn’t feel it was in the best interest of the parents to pursue it.

Two years later the parents hadn’t progressed, in fact, their situation looked bleaker than before. My husband felt that in considering the best interest of the parents he was overlooking another side of this—the children. We also realized, as we talked this over, that the parents still had an obligation to support their children. It was at this point that my husband sought help from the State of Utah.

He learned that there was a financial program for people just like us. It is called Specified Relative Assistance. We also learned that this program would indeed go after the parents for child support to recoup some of the expense of the assistance.

This program gave us a monthly payment for caring for these children plus free school lunch and additional (secondary) insurance for them. It is actually cheaper for the state to assist in this manner than for those same kids to be cared for in the foster care program.

As for the parents participation in the child support; they have yet to pay a dime. But the state continues to provide assistance. The obligation the parents have to provide for their children remains in effect as the child support bill continues to rise.

Each state has its own regulations. Some may have a similar program to that of the State of Utah. Others may not have anything at all. It doesn’t hurt to find out what is available. Contact your state.

Does drug rehab work?

Don't you just love loaded questions? Depending on who you ask, you'll get radically different answers about the success rates of rehabilitation. Even about particular rehab programs, you will get huge swings of opinion. Take twelve step programs for instance. My sister-in-law believes they don't work. The funny part is that as long as she believes that, it's true for her.

I've read through the entire workbook for a twelve step program produced by my church. They worked with Alcoholics Anonymous to develop an adapted faith-based program. I was impressed with the program. It's designed for addicts of all sorts. Emotional addicts, chemical dependency, and a whole raft of other problems can all be addressed through the program with minor adjustments. I decided that reading it wasn't enough for me to really understand it, so I've actually gone through the first third (so far) of the material meeting all the requirements and answering all the questions on my own as a self-help guide.

So far, I don't see what there is to the program that wouldn't work. The twelve steps are represented by honesty, hope, trust in God, truth, confession, change of heart, humility, seeking forgiveness, restitution and reconciliation, daily accountability, personal revelation, and service. There's nothing shocking or contrary to be found in the whole list.

I can see how several of those steps can be terrifying to someone into a problem way over their head. It can be intimidating for me, when my goal with the personal review of the program is to change some fairly minor aspects of my life.

I can also see that such a program, when applied properly, can transform a person. It can help them to purge the part of their life that is destroying them, and replace it with peace, joy and success. Successful rehabilitation programs can give back things that seem impossible to achieve when viewed from the depths of addiction.

The answer is "YES," these programs can work. They do work, but not for everyone, and not with great predictability. No program will succeed if the addict is unwilling to change absolutely everything that needs to change. No fair holding onto that one questionable friendship. Keeping a stash hidden away for emergencies is admitting defeat. Thinking you know better than the ones running the program is a major sign of pending failure. Deciding you can skip a step because it sounds too hard or pointless will likely doom the effort.

The net result is that success requires several things, many of which are really hard to give. These things include submission, humility, and a desire to do whatever it is required to succeed. Success is also a bit different than some might expect. It may not mean getting back to the way things were. For some, that restoration is just impossible. Everyone else's lives keep moving forward, and if an addict checks out for a few years, the world just isn't the same when they come back. The children we care for have grown over the past two and a half years. Their parents just can't get that time back. But the parents can change, move forward, and be a part of the lives of their children in the future with planning and hard work.

Sorry for not having an easy solution that will work for everyone in minimum time, but that's the way things work. Free will plays a huge part, and if will is opposed to recovery, then recovery fails. If free will is applied entirely to recovering no matter what is required, then success is simply waiting in the wings for the work to be done.

If you are the one wanting to recover, make the sacrifice to start now with your entire heart. If you're concerned about a loved one, support the good decisions they make, and let them know that you approve of their good efforts. It could be all that's needed to nudge them from failure to success.

Document Everything

The parents of the child you care for will have troubled lives. That is a given, because you wouldn't have to care for the child otherwise. Identifying exactly how troubled is really quite impossible without spending every moment with them, which is completely impractical. Still, it is critical to have as much of a record as you can manage detailing how things are going.

We've come up with a novel way of tracking how the parents of our kids-in-care are doing. Whenever either my wife's sister or her husband have a court date, I put it onto a calendar. Whenever they make a phone call, that also goes onto the calendar along with a description of the call. When one of them is arrested or released due to either bail or overcrowding, that goes on just like everything else.

Any medium will do. You can use a pad of paper, an email program with calendaring, or any of the many web calendaring tools like those at Google or Yahoo. The method isn't nearly as important as the content. My personal preference at the moment is Google, because it allows me to easily share the calendar with other family members who share our interest.

In our case, the troubles are not just social, but legal as well. What if I want to count how many days they were in jail last year? Break out the calendar. How many times did they call in January? Look it up. What if I can't remember the ID number for that Identity Theft case? Look that up too.

That leads to another area of information that is really useful. Some jails have online access to bookings, releases and occupancy. Check your county lockup to see if they do. If they have one, that web interface can give you a lot of information so you know what's going on in their life. Many courts also publish calendars online, and you can sometimes even look up warrant information. My wife and I have collected a great set of links for the Salt Lake City area. Here's a sampling:

Salt Lake County Jail
Utah District Court Calendars
Davis County Sheriff
Salt Lake County District Attorney Active Cases

A lot of cities do not have electronic interfaces to their court calendars, warrants, or citations. That means it will take plain old phone calling to look things up with those smaller jurisdictions. Most jurisdictions are perfectly willing to share information if you can document that you have a reason to be interested, or if you already have case numbers.

The more information you have on what they're doing, where they're living, when they call, where they are working and everything else, the better armed you will be to either support their claim of being recovered and reformed, or to support protecting their children from them, depending on the path they take.

Insurance Issues

When we picked up four kids-in-care, we hadn't considered everything that we would need to arrange to properly see to their needs. We knew that they needed a home, food and schooling, but beyond that we hadn't really thought about it. There's a limit to what you can do on a single day's notice.

One of the issues we hadn't thought much about in advance was insurance. I have my family insured through my employer. The family policy covers medical and dental insurance as most similar plans do. The children arrived uninsured, since neither parent had a job with insurance benefits. They'd been on state aid for a while, but that's all we had record of.

I approached the Human Resources department at work to see what would be necessary to add the new kids to the insurance plan. They told me that the kids could not be added to the policy. In order to add them, I would need custody of the kids to be formally given to me through the courts.

At this point the parents hadn't yet shown signs of serious drug addiction. I don't even know if they were regular drug abusers at that point. All I knew was that the kids were going to be with us for a while while the parents were fighting, and that the parents could not insure them. It's a scary feeling to be financially exposed like that. What if one of the kids needed surgery or hospitalization for some other reason? Whose obligation would it be to pay?

A little study showed me that it was still the parent's responsibility to support their children, even after custody changes. That did me little good, since I knew they had nothing to pay in case of emergency. That all lead to a real soul-searching conversation with the parents. I told them that to properly care for their children, they needed insurance. Since the parents couldn't provide it, there weren't really many options.

I could insure them, but only if I had custody. There may have been some form of state aid available without the formal change in custody, but I wasn't familiar with what agencies to contact at that point. The parents decided with us that it was best to sign over custody, so we went through all the paperwork. Utah has a convenient Internet-based system called OCAP (Online Court Assistance Program) for uncontested cases where you can represent yourself and pay greatly reduced court fees.

We filled out the paperwork, got the required signatures, and got a court date. We were there, both parents were there, and my wife's mother was there together in the courtroom. After a few tears and no objections, we had been given full custody, which allowed us to insure the children through my work policy. All I needed was to take to our Human Resources department an original stamped version of the court order along with all the birthdates and social security numbers of the children. It was easy, since the custody paperwork had required all that information anyway.

I've changed jobs since then, but it's been the same routine. Get a certificate of creditable coverage for everyone in the family, and take the original custody form to prove that they should be allowed on the insurance policy.

Now that we have custody, it is the parent's responsibility to demonstrate to us at some point in the future that they can once again care for the children. They're back together now, and have at least a desire to get clean. We play it month by month and year by year, always making sure the children know they are welcome and can plan to be with us forever if necessary.

Those of you with a court-ordered custody cases rather than voluntary cases have different rules and requirements, and quite likely a deadline after which the state proceeds to adoption rather than reunification. Those of you with no custody arrangement at all should examine the possibilities closely and do what you can to best care for the children.

For us, it was a poignant but necessary step in giving the children the care they needed. Will it work out that way for you? I couldn't possibly predict that because I don't know your unique situation. I'm simply sharing one case of how things turned out, and hoping to have shared some possibilities that will be useful with you.

Drug Addiction Recovery Resources

If you know of a good web resource for drug addiction recovery, foster children, or kin care, post a reply here and let us all know what you've found and why it has helped you. Between us, we'll do a lot better job of locating all those useful bits of the Internet. I know that I certainly haven't found all the useful stuff out there.

Just include a URL, the name, and why you think it was useful.