Children of the Drug War : Exposed Prenatally, Babies Need Top Care
When she arrived at the Covina Development Center in May, 2-year-old Diane weighed nine pounds, couldn’t walk or swallow solid food and stared blankly at her teachers.
Four months later, the tot with the curly black hair is up to 15 pounds. She’s eating meals and making eye contact. Her development is now equivalent to that of a 3-month-old child.
Such is the heartbreakingly slow progress made by children exposed prenatally to drugs. Diane--not her real name--is one of about 35 children in the preschool program at the Covina Development Center who suffer learning disabilities because their mothers smoked crack, shot heroin, took PCP or mixed all three with alcohol while pregnant.
At the Covina center, teachers are on the front line of what experts call a developing epidemic. No one knows how many drug-exposed children are growing up across America, but Dr. Ira J. Chasnoff, president of the National Assn. for Perinatal Addiction Research and Education in Chicago, estimates that more than 375,000 of the 3.9 million babies born each year have been exposed prenatally to drugs.
Doctors say prenatal drug exposure can leave children with a variety of emotional, physiological and neurological problems that linger long after a newborn undergoes withdrawal. Damage can range from mental retardation and convulsions in the most extreme cases to poor motor and cognitive skills, hyperactivity, speech defects, an inability to concentrate or remember, violence, apathy and lack of emotion.
To complicate matters, doctors and teachers say it’s impossible to separate the prenatal damage done by drugs and alcohol from the environmental problems bred by poverty and neglect. Often, the two go hand in hand; bouncing children from abusive parents to institutions and foster homes doesn’t help, professionals say.
Covina’s is one of a handful of programs in the Los Angeles area that work with drug-exposed children, all of whom have been removed by court order from their families and placed in foster homes. At the preschool, teachers, psychologists and aides help children ages 1 to 4 develop play skills, control their tempers, interact in small groups and build self-confidence.
Although much remains unknown about how to educate drug-exposed children, experience has taught those at the Covina Resource Center that emotional nurturing and individualized attention are the keys.
“The biggest thrust of our program is to redevelop their sense of trust. They’re very fragile emotionally,” says Executive Director Paula Jeppson, who operates the nonprofit center in classrooms leased from the Covina Christian Church.
“Often, they haven’t bonded with anybody. We try to make the world very safe for them so they can concentrate on learning activities,” Jeppson says.
She believes most drug-exposed children have the potential to improve if they receive focused help in their first years of life. But she adds that there is not enough money available from state, federal and local agencies to identify and work with them. At Covina, teachers have worked with about 200 drug-exposed babies in the last three years, assigning one staff member to each three children at a cost of $60 per child per day. Two-thirds of the program’s funding comes from the Covina-San Gabriel-Pomona Regional Center, which funnels state money to local agencies that work with the developmentally disabled. The San Gabriel Valley Assn. for Retarded Citizens provides the rest.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, administrators are in their third year of a pilot program to identify and teach drug-exposed children.
But Jeppson estimates there are thousands of drug-exposed children in Los Angeles County who are falling through the cracks of a system that doesn’t recognize their unique problems. Local agencies are set up to deal with disabilities such as mental retardation or deafness, but most drug-exposed children don’t fit those categories.
As a result, they have a difficult time qualifying for funding. Others become victims of their own success if they score too high on achievement tests that are administered periodically. Drug-exposed children often score high on IQ tests but are saddled with overwhelming behavioral and learning disabilities that make it impossible for them to function in a regular classroom, Jeppson said.
Take Johnny (not his real name), who underwent heroin withdrawal at birth and was shuttled from foster home to foster home because of physical and emotional problems. Placed in the Covina center, he began to thrive. His tantrums stopped and he progressed in play skills. But when he scored above 69% on an achievement test, he no longer qualified for public funding and was placed in regular kindergarten.
In a class with 30 other children, Johnny regressed. He threw tantrums that lasted hours. When teachers chastised him, he only grew worse. Eventually, the court placed Johnny in an institution.
“These kids have an enormous potential to get better if they’re served,” Jeppson says. “If not, society is not going to be able to contain them.”
Jeppson says courts, schools, social services and funding agencies must recognize the special needs of drug-exposed children and create a new category to deal with them.
Fifteen years ago, Jeppson said, her center worked mainly with children who were developmentally disabled because of Down’s syndrome or other, more traditional problems.
Three years ago, however, children with unusual new troubles hit the preschool center. These drug-exposed babies threw uncontrollable tantrums. They were easily overwhelmed by too many people, toys, noise or movement.
Today, they make up 70% of the Covina Resource Center children.
Now, teachers meet the children at the bus every morning, taking their hands, leading them into the classrooms, addressing them by name to reassure them about their new environment. New concepts are introduced slowly, accompanied by exaggerated physical or verbal cues to prepare the child.
Showering the children with attention and affection is also important, teachers have found. For children who have spent their young lives shuttling from foster to group care homes, a nurturing teacher may provide the only consistent security and love they know.
“These children need to feel safe, and sometimes their worlds need to get just a little smaller,” Jeppson said. “They do beautifully here, but put them in a classroom with 30 other children and they fall apart.”
