Three-quarters of child welfare cases involve addiction, making juvenile court more about drug abuse than child abuse

Sunday, October 12, 2003

By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

For a decade, Tangela Smith dragged her kids, caseworkers and juvenile court judges around with her on a path to nowhere.

	TAKING A TANGLED PATH HOME THE SERIES Today: One woman, one family's journey through juvenile court, where three-quarters of child welfare cases involve addiction, making the court more about drug abuse than child abuse. Day Two: An addict's recovery can mean defeat for a family. Day Three: If redemption for drug addicts usually involves relapses, how long does a child welfare system keep children in limbo awaiting a parent's real recovery?

She got high on crack cocaine. She got clean. She got high again.

Her children went to foster care. They went home. They were sent away again.

The cycle is frustratingly familiar to those who deal with its consequences. Three-quarters of child welfare cases involve addiction, making juvenile court more about drug abuse than child abuse.

Addicted parents rarely batter or beat. Instead, they forget and neglect. Their children are unwashed, unfed, uneducated. But they're not unloved. And they love their parents, as Smith's did her.

"Most of our cases involve neglect by people so addicted that they have lost the power to choose doing the right thing by their children," said Judge Cheryl Allen, who got Smith's case just weeks after moving to juvenile court in 1992.

Allen would be extraordinarily patient with Smith's on-and-off recovery because she saw a kind and loving heart in the young mother. Her hunch would be supported by psychological reports that Smith's children were deeply bonded to her.

Allen could release everyone from the revolving door of Smith's addiction by terminating her parental rights and hoping new parents would be found for the children so attached to their mother.

Or Smith could stop the cycle by truly recovering.

That takes moxie.

Smith got precious little from her parents. But they did give her that.

Smith is typical of the addicts whose fractured lives child welfare agencies such as Allegheny County's Office of Children, Youth and Families try to mend for the sake of the children.

She grew up in a troubled home and became a troubled adult. Her mother was an alcoholic and later a crack addict. At the age of 56, Smith's mother pleaded guilty to her last drug charge; at 58 she was dead.

Smith's father concedes only to being a weekend alcoholic. Smith's mother shot him once when she thought he was with another woman. He brutalized her more than once when he thought she'd been with another man. It's not clear who shot him the second time, as he lay in bed sleeping one night. That's when he left. Smith was 9.

Despite the drinking, abandonment and unreliability, Smith loves her father and loved her mother until the day she died.

Tangela Smith cradles her youngest daughter, Mooky, 1, in her arms as she reads a Mother's Day card made for her by her oldest daughter, Tay, 11, during a visit with her children supervised by child welfare caseworkers in April of 1999. (Martha Rial/Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image. About this story Reporter Barbara White Stack and photographer Martha Rial began work on this series early in 1999 when Stack learned that a mother whose parental rights had been terminated might get her children back anyway. At that time, juvenile court hearings were closed to the public. With that limitation, the story would have been restricted to Smith's account. But Common Pleas Judge Cheryl Allen gave the Post-Gazette access to Smith's hearings, with consent from Smith and Allegheny County's Office of Children, Youth and Families. Some KidsVoice child advocates objected, but Allen opened the hearings anyway. This access gave the Post-Gazette an unprecedented view of all angles in the case -- Smith's, CYF's, the children's and the court's. During the four years Stack and Rial tracked Smith, the Post-Gazette won an appeal, so that juvenile court hearings now are presumptively open statewide.

In the years after Smith's father left, the family house burned to the ground and Smith was sent to live with a relative. He raped her repeatedly. She was 13 and pregnant when her mother rescued her and then arranged an abortion.

Four years later, 17-year-old Smith delivered her first baby, a daughter she'd lose at just 3 months to septicemia, a blood infection frequently fatal to the very old and the very young.

Such childhood traumas are like psychic bullet wounds, and Smith is riddled with them. One way to heal them is with therapy. Another, which gives the illusion of working ever so much more quickly, is with drugs and alcohol.

Smith tried therapy. She was committed to a psychiatric hospital after her baby died. She would be hospitalized repeatedly over the years and offered a variety of prescription drugs and diagnoses. But none of that provided the escape from the brutal reality of life that crack cocaine later did.

In two decades of assessments for juvenile court, psychologist Neil Rosenblum has seen many cases like Smith's -- the children of addicts growing up to be addicts who lose their children.

"Substance abuse comes about for a reason," he said. "Some is a biological predisposition. But it typically comes as a result of a background or pattern of low self-esteem and poor role modeling."

Despite the modeling Smith received, she managed to give love and nurturing to her first two surviving children, Tay and Jay, both born before she was 20 and before she picked up a crack pipe.

Smith delivered Tay in the spring of 1987 and Jay a year later. She was living in a public housing apartment in Allequippa Terrace in Terrace Village with the two babies who were more important to her than anything. She was coping without the help of either father.

But it would all fall apart within a year after Jay was born.

The cycle begins

Little Tay, 4, Tangela Smith's third daughter, ties her shoes after dressing herself in the bedroom she shares with her baby sister, Mooky, in their mother's Swissvale apartment. Click photo for larger image.

For Smith, addiction started comparatively late. She was 20.

At a party, a friend offered her a cigarette laced with crack. Smith took a hit. The pleasure she felt was overwhelming.

She continued to smoke to obtain that feeling. She did it without knowing at the outset that the drug was crack. She did it without understanding crack's addictive power. Soon she was doing it full time.

It was 1988, near the beginning of the crack epidemic that stormed across the country, splintering families like tornadoes splatter homes. Since then, the number of children in foster care nationwide has risen 60 percent.

In May 1989, caseworkers visited Smith's apartment and found it in complete disarray, as a caller to the agency told them it would be. The refrigerator was empty. The once-precious babies forgotten.

The workers took 2-year-old Tay and 1-year-old Jay. Smith visited them in foster care, but continued to smoke crack.

Looking back now, Smith can recall how she forgot the babies who had been the center of her life. "The drug did not allow me to feel those feelings. I knew my kids were important. But the drug took over my mind like someone put a disc in my head and I was a robot; and I did whatever the drug wanted me to do, and I could not shake it."

Like many women whose maternal instincts are subordinated by drugs, Smith couldn't even stop when she became pregnant again, by a new boyfriend whom she quickly left because he was abusive. Smith's third baby, nicknamed Coco, was born Oct. 1, 1990, and tested positive for drugs.

To persuade social workers to let her take Coco home from the hospital, Smith promised sobriety.

Precious few addicts can stop on their own, however. And when Coco was 8 months old, Smith decided she needed help. She asked her stepsister to care for the baby while she went to residential treatment.

Within days, the stepsister handed Coco over to caseworkers, dispiriting Smith, who'd wanted to avoid foster care for her third child.

Still, she stayed off crack and in treatment.

Months later, she came out clean and rejuvenated. She was doing well when her case was moved to Allen's court list.

At that hearing, Allen permitted the three children to visit Smith at her apartment, a major step toward their return to her.

Like many addicts, though, Smith would squander that chance.

Hitting bottom?

	During a supervised visit in an office of Children, Youth and Families, Tangela Smith's oldest daughter, Tay, 11, stands the youngest daughter, Mooky, 1, in her lap while Smith briefly sits her son, Jay, 10, on her lap before realizing he's too big. Click photo for larger image.

In those heady days after Smith graduated from treatment, she faced ordinary financial and housing problems, as well as demands from caseworkers that she present an organized home for the children during visits. She struggled and, at some point, resorted to burning up her problems in a crack pipe.

Such behavior makes addicts challenging for social workers and judges. They know drugs or alcohol cause addicts' problems. But addicts believe they need to use drugs or alcohol to cope with problems.

That rationalization rarely is cured on the first or even the second treatment stint. And while a person in recovery may abstain from the drug, if the perverse thinking continues, it's often only a matter of time before the addict justifies a return to drugs.

Though juvenile court judges such as Allen understand the cycle, they won't accept it forever. Sometimes, all the court's resources and all the caseworkers' efforts can't put addicts' families back together again.

So, in October 1992, when it was clear Smith was using once more, Allen ordered the children's cases moved to the CYF adoption department.

The court, patient with addicts, would be forced to show similar restraint in dealing with CYF. Workers took a year and a half to arrange the evaluations of Smith and her children necessary for the termination hearing at which Smith's legal rights to her children could be severed, freeing the children for adoption.

Rosenblum did those assessments. He found the children, who were by then 7, 6 and 4 years old, still closely bonded to Smith, and at the termination hearing in June 1994, he urged Allen to give Smith another chance because of that deep attachment.

Such second chances are rare after the amount of time Smith's children had spent in foster care. But Allen offered Smith an opportunity.

As Smith stood in court that July day, she was seven months pregnant with her fourth child. Allen told her if she stayed sober, she could keep that baby and eventually regain custody of the other three youngsters.

Three months later, in September 1994, the baby was born and tested clean.

But Smith didn't.

She was not yet up to Allen's challenge.

The judge sent the newborn to foster care and terminated Tay, Jay and Coco from Smith.

The three were adopted, and Smith, once again, enrolled in drug treatment.

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