Meth, sex and alcohol

This week, I met the adoptive parents of a 5 year-old girl -let's call her Lucy- who had been born 1 month premature to a mother who tested positive for alcohol and methamphetamines. Lucy had been taken away from the mom, for obvious reasons, and placed with her future adoptive parents, a young couple who were already taking care of her older brother. Other than the brother, who was only 3 years old at the time, the couple had an older child of their own, and had just adopted another unwanted premie a few months before. They didn't want to take on another baby, but did not want to separate the abandoned siblings who had never even met.

Lucy weighed 4 lbs at birth, appeared "excessively alert" and reactive to every noise and sound. She had unstable sleeping and eating patterns and screamed for the first three months almost all the time. Her adoptive parents noted "odd" behavior early on, including long moments of blank stares. She had poor communication skills and severe problems with expressing emotions which led to such uncontrollable temper tantrums that she would usually hyperventilate and vomit. She hit, kicked and bit people. As soon as she was able to walk, the family had to put locks on every drawer, cabinet and large appliance in the house because she would wander in the middle of the night and "hide things" -- one day stuffing her brother's backpack with items from the refrigerator, another day throwing the house bills and her dad's wallet into the garbage can. Several times, when she was only 4 years old, her mother had to call 911 because Lucy was so angry and worked up that her mom did not have the strength to restrain her.

Lucy is a beautiful girl and has no physically visible impairments, and the police and other authority figures had a hard time believing that she could possibly be as difficult to deal with as her parents said. When her energy is spent or she is not aggravated, she follows her parents around the house, seeks their love and approval and even tries to immitate them as they go about their work.

She is in special 1-to-1 day care and has been enrolled in most of the county's mental health and assistance programs for young children. She has been on a coctail of serious antipsychotic medications. Her parents have spent most of their savings to pay for counseling and treatment and her father has cut down his work hours so that he can spend more time helping his wife out at home. They worry that they are neglecting their other children, two of whom have ADHD and one who has cerebral palsy. And still nothing seems to help, and her aggressive behavior appears to actually be escalating. When, soon after her 5th birthday, she threatened several times to push her mom and one of her siblings down the stairs, her adoptive parents, having exhausted most of the resources they could think of, began to consider giving up custody of their adoptive daughter. If they do give her up, placement of this child will be near impossible. She will likely bounce from foster homes to group homes until all are exhausted and she is institutionalized in an out-of-state facility until she turns 18.

We met the family during a month long evaluation process where a team of expert child psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists will work together to try to fully evaluate this child. They will then try to give her family, teachers, therapists and the little girl herself skills and coping mechanisms that might possibly help her improve enough that she will be able to remain with her family. Due to her brain's early exposure to amphetamines and alcohol, she is, as one of the psychologists pointed out, a "neurochemical mess", and though she may get a little better, the process will be long and difficult and her life will remain terribly hard.