Excerpt from Wednesday Night “Mom” – The Challenges and Rewards of Volunteering with Abused and Neglected Children, by Margaret A. Bengs, Published by Publish America.

From Chapter 3, “The Gift of Time,” pp. 29-31:

….There she was, a little cherub, the sun glistening red-gold in her hair, her face round and innocent, her voice soft as a dove’s. I could not have imagined what I would later witness during her “blowouts.” Sometimes, when I was spending time with other children in a room down the hall from hers, I would suddenly hear a howl, an almost animal cry that seemed to threaten to break out the windows. I would listen as one of the staff tried to calm her – but she fought and yelled and screamed until the building seemed to shake.

It is a custom that volunteers can bring the evening snack, which I do from time to time. The children always love to help serve it. One night, when I told Aimee that she could help with the snack and we were in the kitchen just beginning to serve the ice cream, Bruce, one of the staff, came in and told her to go do her homework, that she couldn’t help. She let out a bellow – a jagged-edged, guttural cry – and stood in the hall screaming, “Bruce!!! Bruce!!” She yelled and shouted with all her might until she finally disappeared into her room.

Another time she got so mad at Bruce that she picked up a metal chair from the dining room and threatened to throw it over the counter into the kitchen, where he stood. I can still see her hoisting that chair over her head – a fairy princess with long auburn curls, heaving her shoulders like King Kong about to throw a building on the city below.

I was soon to find out the source of Aimee’s emotional problems. Most abused and neglected children, like Aimee and the others here, have a profound sense of worthlessness. Children who have lost contact with their parents due to termination of parental rights or to the parents’ emotional abandonment “often have feelings of guilt associated with the unreasonable belief of having done something to cause the loss or not having prevented it,” Betsy Cuttle, MSW, a social worker and an individual and family therapist at the Home, told us at a training session for volunteers.

Aggressive behavior may be a response to the inability to handle fears, frustration, or anger. This behavior may be a way to assert control over a world that is unpredictable. It may be a method of working through the anger of being separated from their parents, she told us.

Aimee had entered the Sacramento Children’s Home a few months before I began here. She and her siblings were declared Dependents of Sacramento County nearly three years prior to her arrival, because their mother had a substance abuse problem that rendered her incapable of caring for her children. Just before her children were taken away, Aimee’s mother was found under the influence of controlled substances while operating a motor vehicle with the children inside. During one explosive episode, she caused a hot pan to strike a child’s eye area, causing an eye injury. She also struck Aimee ’s younger brother, resulting in police involvement. The children’s father had an extensive criminal history, was incarcerated, and was unable to care for the children.

Aimee had had multiple foster placements since being taken away from her mother. During the year prior to arriving here, she had been in several foster homes and a group home. She had difficulty adjusting and reports indicated that she became increasingly assaultive and aggressive and engaged in self-damaging behavior. She had horrific temper tantrums lasting up to two hours, as well as occasional inability to control her bladder and bowel movements. Tantrums sometimes involved biting, hitting, screaming, and throwing objects. At the time she entered the Children’s Home, she was allowed occasional supervised visits with her mother and certain other family members. Her psychiatric diagnoses included Anxiety Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Chronic Sexual Abuse of a child by child’s report. She was also the victim of neglect and physical abuse. She had made threatening statements regarding killing herself and others. Her self-loathing behavior had included head banging, scratching, and punching herself.

The strengths noted by the intake staff were those that I had spotted right away. She was a creative, bright child, responded well to structure, and could be very likeable. She performed at an average level in school.

On this first night, I had observed none of her “blowouts” yet nor did I know anything about her background, but I knew that, as a volunteer, my role was to be a friend, to be consistent, to help give the children hope, to show them that they are worthwhile. I also knew that something profound was beginning to happen in my life. When it was time for Aimee to go to bed, she asked if I would tuck her in and read her a book. After reading the book, she wanted me to stroke her arm. As I stroked her arm and spoke softly to her, she closed her eyes. A light flooded over her face, its features softened, the furrow in her brow disappeared – and the chord of a harp played in my heart. It was as though we are all connected in some heavenly sphere where a glorious symphony plays, and every once in a while, we are gifted to hear ever so faintly sweet bars of its music wafting across our earthly plain.

The author, Margaret Bengs, is a retired managing editor and writer of the CA Attorney General’s Crime and Violence Prevention Center. A contributor to state and national publications, she has written extensively on the problem of child abuse and neglect, and has volunteered with abused and neglected children for more than a decade. The book is available on www.amazon.com, www.borders.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, and www.publishamerica.com

Prevent Fetal Alcohol Damage, Give Kids a Chance, by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer

Research shows that alcohol use during pregnancy can result in fetal alcohol damage. As many as 40,000 infants born in the U.S. each year experience alcohol-related birth defects, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

While many parents are aware of the potential effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) -- children born with central nervous system problems, reduced growth and abnormal facial features -- they may not know that researchers now believe that there are three to four times as many fetal-alcohol-damaged people without the telltale facial features.

The term, “Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders” (FASD), refers to the many different problems, from mild to severe, caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol. Alcohol damage to the fetus’s brain can result in lowered IQ; difficulties with math, memory and spatial orientation; difficulties with judgment, impulse control and focus; mood disorders; and vulnerability to mental illness. It can also cause lack of empathy and bonding with others, medical problems and language abnormalities.

Of those individuals with problems resulting from fetal alcohol damage studied by researchers at the University of Washington, 90 percent had mental illness, 60 percent were expelled from or dropped out of school and 60 percent had trouble with the law. Crimes committed by individuals with FASD ages 12-20 in this study included theft, burglary assault, child molestation, domestic violence and murder.

Probation staff involved in Special Education referral at Juvenile Hall in Santa Clara County estimate that three-quarters of their referrals fall into the 65-75 IQ range (the normal range is between 90-110), and that more than 90 percent of those referrals were exposed to fetal alcohol damage. Indeed, fetal alcohol damage can contribute not only to a tragic waste of human potential, but also to a life of destruction and violence.

Adults with fetal alcohol exposure studied were also five times more likely to abuse substances than the general population, thus perpetuating the cycle of mental, family and social problems.

None of this has to happen. Fetal alcohol exposure is 100 percent preventable. With increased awareness, parents can take strong precautions to prevent fetal exposure to alcohol. Communities can reach out to high-risk parents and refer them to substance abuse services.

If it is too late and a child is born after being exposed to alcohol, the best course is early diagnosis and treatment. Factors that help prevent a child with fetal alcohol exposure from developing some of the more devastating problems include living in a stable and nurturing home, early diagnosis and services, a strong support system and absence from violence. Many parents share stories of children who are now happy and productive, thanks to appropriate diagnosis and intervention.

For additional information on fetal alcohol exposure, visit the NIAAA web site at www.niaaa.nih.gov, the Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome at www.nofas.org and the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities at www.cdc.gov/ncbddd.

We owe it to our kids to prevent fetal alcohol brain damage, and give them the best chance possible in life.

Excerpt from Magic Trees of the Mind, by Marian Diamond, Ph.D. and Janet Hopson; published by Penquin Putnam, Inc., New York City, NY 10014; Plume Printing, 1999

"Dreaming Eyes of Wonder" page 130 – 133

Researchers are currently trying to discover how much recovery is possible in orphans and other children deprived of loving contact in their formative infant and toddler years.

In Bruce Perry's opinion, "a year of neglect, if it's in the first year, robs a child forever, shifts down their potential along a spectrum. You can have either shorter, earlier periods of profound neglect," he says, "or you can have longer less consistent attention and come up with the same thing: unattached, emotionally empty individuals. And these kids are highly likely to be violent." When a young child is neglected or abused, he says, he or she tends to have less inhibitory capacity, based, in part, on impaired development in the frontal lobes. The lower the capacity to inhibit anti-social behavior, "the more impulsive, the more aggressive, the more reactive [the child will] be."

Perry sees this reduced inhibitory ability in the children in his practice. " Where there is community violence and domestic violence" in their immediate environment, "their ability to contain themselves is gone." Add alcohol to the equation, and their behavior becomes " literally subhuman. You read about crimes where kids get drunk and go out in packs, find somebody, beat the hell out of them, cut them up, set them on fire, and stab them fifty times. So much of it," Perry sighs, "is facilitated by an affective retardation, an attachment retardation. They never got what they wanted when they were young, so that the value of another human being to them, literally, is about the same as most of us would feel about a squirrel or a toad. It is remorseless violence"

Without actually looking at a person's brain tissues, experts can only speculate on the ways emotional abuse and neglect affect the brain and change its course of development. But it is easy to find disturbing examples of remorseless violence in the news. The parade of lamentable stories, month after month, may be just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Bruce Perry estimates that more than 3 million American children experience extreme abuse or neglect each year. If the trauma comes early in childhood, he says, the impact is greater on the brain stem and limbic structures, and upon basic functions like sleep, anxiety, and impulsiveness. If the trauma comes between ages two and five, it is more likely to affect brain regions that regulate mood and thinking. Girls are more likely to react by dissociation---daydreaming, fantasizing, and going numbly inward, while boys are more likely to become aggressive. But in either case, says Perry, their own emptiness and lack of attachment can get passed on to their children.

It is not clear how much restoration is possible once a young child has suffered short periods of intense abuse and neglect, or longer periods of lower-level trauma. It is clear, though that a very young child who is deprived of love, attention, physical affection, and affiliations—heart connections—is living in a deprived environment that may feed back, through direct experience, to produce short- or long-term changes in the brain. It is also clear that one of the best ways to enrich an infant or toddler is through unstinting amounts of affection, to build security and self-esteem that will influence all the child's other experience, and all further enrichments, throughout life.

Kurt Fischer, a Harvard University educator and cognitive neuroscientist, agrees. "It's the emotional stuff that's really important…where my efforts go as a parent is into building a good, strong relationship with my twins so they can trust me to have their welfare in mind." Adds Fischer, "It's actually the social and emotional dimensions that predict long-term mental health better than most other things."