CHILDREN OF METH USERS SUFFER FROM PARENTS' ADDICTION

Celeste Seaton's troubled childhood led her to become hooked on
methamphetamine at the age of 17. But now, after graduating from
months of treatment for her addiction, the 20-year-old Sioux City
woman can see how the drug has also affected her children's lives.

Seaton first tried to quit for good when she knew she was pregnant
with her daughter, Jaden. But after Jaden was born, Seaton said she
started using again because she couldn't cope with the pressures of
raising a child.

It wasn't long before Department of Human Services officials took the
1-year-old out of the home and placed her into pre-adoptive foster
care. She entered treatment twice in attempts to become sober and
reunite with Jaden, but said she walked out of both within the first
week. When she found out she was pregnant with her son, Jayson, she
knew she needed help to stop.

"I couldn't do it on my own. I was pretty depressed, and meth made me
feel better," Seaton said. "But I didn't want to lose him, too ... I
didn't want to start using again like I did after I had Jaden."

She spent four months in outpatient treatment, and Jayson was born
two days after she came to live at Jackson Recovery Center. As the
1-month-old heads home with her and her boyfriend, Steve Thompson,
Seaton said she knows she has to concentrate on staying clean for
both of her children -- or she may never see either of them again.

"I want to have my daughter back," she said. "Sometimes I think I
want to use again, but I look at him and Jaden and I just don't. I
can't .. I screwed up a couple of times, but I want us all to be together."

Impact On Children

Jaden and Jayson are only two of many children in Northwest Iowa
whose lives have been affected in some way by parental meth use.

DHS statistics show that about 2,800 children are in foster care
statewide each year -- and nearly 600 of those are in Northwest Iowa.
Chuck Illg, DHS methamphetamine specialist for the Sioux City service
area, said as many as 40 percent of these placements are related to
their parents' drug addictions. Because meth has become the most
popular drug of abuse behind marijuana in Iowa, he said, up to 80
percent of those cases include meth use.

DHS spokesman Roger Munns said the agency doesn't normally track the
number of cases it handles that specifically involve meth or any
other drug, so it is sometimes hard to tell its effects. But within
the last five years, caseworkers across the state have begun to
realize meth's impact on the children they serve, he said.

A 2003 DHS study in the Council Bluffs service area revealed that
more than a third of all its cases included parental meth use.

Last year alone, more than 1,700 Iowa children -- nearly 250 of which
were from Northwest Iowa -- were found by DHS to have illegal drugs
in their systems from inhaling smoke or touching drug paraphernalia.
Most of these cases involved meth, DHS officials said.

In addition, 15 of the 300 children statewide who were exposed to or
lived in a residence containing a meth lab in 2004 lived in Northwest Iowa.

Over the past two years, lawmakers have hoped to clean up some of the
state's meth use by reducing the number of meth labs in Iowa, and one
effort appears to have had some impact. After an Iowa law went into
effect May 21 limiting the sale of products containing
pseudoepedrine, a main meth ingredient, police reported finding
nearly 75 percent fewer labs through June, July and August of this
year than in those same months in 2004.

But according to numbers provided by the Iowa Office of Drug Control
Policy, a more modest 32.5 percent decrease in labs has been recorded
in Northwest Iowa.

The impact of the law may be relatively small on Iowa's children
overall. Although it may have reduced the number of labs , thereby
hopefully reducing the number of children exposed to the many dangers
involved, at least 80 percent of Iowa's available meth supply
continues to be imported across state lines.

"People who want to use meth can still get it easily," Illg said.

The Court Decides

Last year the Woodbury County attorney's office filed more than 200
petitions to help protect 390 children in need of assistance
throughout the county, said Dewey Sloan, assistant county attorney.
Meth was involved in nearly 45 percent of these cases, he said.

Children in need of assistance are those most likely to be abused or
neglected, Sloan said. The juvenile court system determines the
children's status according to guidelines in Iowa law. The court
usually considers parental meth use to fall under the guidelines,
bringing the children under the court's jurisdiction, he said.

"The goal is to maintain unity with the parent and keep as much
structure as possible, so first DHS tries to provide services to
parents in the home," Sloan said. "If that doesn't work, the child is
removed from the home. If the problem is too far gone to be solved,
the rights of the parent are terminated so the child can move to an
adoptive home."

Half of the 68 petitions filed by the Woodbury County attorney's
office to terminate parental rights to 130 children were related to
meth use, he said, whether it involved the child being exposed to the
drug or their parents being arrested for possession.

Sloan deals with the repercussions of parental meth use in some form
every day. He said that on just one day last week he had to argue two
meth-influenced termination of parental rights cases.

"In the first case the children had been left with the parents in a
supervised setting, and the mother was found using again," he said.
"In the other case, the parent was arrested for distribution."

A juvenile judge ultimately decides whether a parent who has been
addicted to meth can be a suitable guardian to their children.

A Vicious Cycle

Seaton said her attraction to meth had its roots in her troubled home
life as a young teenager. Her parents, both alcoholics, were abusive
and "didn't care much about us," she said. When she was 12 years old,
she, her two brothers and older sister were removed from their
parents' custody and put into foster care.

"They didn't want to take care of us at all or get us back," she said.

After six years in different foster homes, Seaton left to live with
her sister. Her sister had introduced her to meth use, she said. Her
sister's boyfriend, a drug dealer, provided them with all the meth they wanted.

"Once I had it, I liked it, and I had to keep having more," Seaton said.

But her problems didn't go away. Seaton said she coped with her
unhappiness the best way she knew how -- by keeping up with an
addiction, the only way she said her family had ever known.

Increased Abuse, Neglect

Children whose parents abuse drugs and alcohol are three times more
likely to be abused and four times more likely to be neglected than
are children whose parents are not substance abusers, according the
Iowa Child Advocacy Board.

These children are also more likely to mimic their parents' addictive
and abusive behaviors themselves.

"There are always more issues involved than just meth, although it is
a huge part of the problem itself," said Chad Sims, DHS ongoing
caseworker supervisor for the Sioux City service area.

Meth is unique because it changes the chemistry of the brain and
severely alters the waking and sleeping cycles, both of which greatly
reduce the amount of parenting a meth addict can provide a child.

"Many meth users have children, it's one of the main issues child
welfare workers are facing right now," Munns said. "No drug could be
worse for children. Long periods of comatose sleeping, sometimes for
a day or so, follows a practically manic high in which the parent is
all over the place. What's happening to their children during this time?"

Shane Frisch, DHS intake caseworker supervisor for the Sioux City
service area, said his workers encounter poor supervision from many
parents using meth. Young children looking for toys to play will pick
up pipes and other materials used to smoke it, or equipment used to
make it. Older children develop behavioral issues and start staying
out late and getting into trouble because their parents aren't paying
attention. Bad grades result from not getting help with homework.

Women who use meth while they are pregnant can create developmental
and medical problems for their babies that will stay with them for
their entire lives.

Children with problems like those caused by meth exposure have a
harder time being adopted if their parents rights are terminated, Frisch said.

"I can't imagine what a child goes through being separated from his
or her parent. That's trauma," Sloan said. "But imagine if you had to
see your mom or dad arrested, taken away in handcuffs. Or seeing them
beat up, or strung out."

Rebuilding Families

Illg said he has found success helping parents recover from meth
addiction, even reuniting families that had once been torn apart by the drug.

"What I'm finding is that by working closely with meth addicts,
allowing supervised visitation in the beginning and helping them to
get into a recovery program, I have a number of success stories
because we can increase contact," he said. "They will have relapses
now and then, but they are reporting them themselves. We are able to
build a good program around them that isn't all punitive."

He said meth users have been much more successful if they are allowed
to see their children because they have a reward to work toward --
being with them as a parent once more. However, that reward works
only if the parent wants to reunite with their children, and he said
some unfortunately don't.

Pure numbers support the relative success of therapy with Iowa's drug
users. According to the 2004 Iowa Department of Public Health
outcomes monitoring system report, 65.5 percent of meth users remain
sober six months after they leave treatment -- a higher rate of
abstinence than found with both marijuana and alcohol addicts.

Janelle Thomosen, director of the Women and Children's Center at
Jackson Recovery where Seaton got help for her addiction, said 200
women come through the center's program every year. Most come to live
with their children at the center for three months, receiving group
and individual therapy as well as participating in group classes on
anger management, time management and coping skills.

Seventy-five percent of women leave the program successfully reunited
with their children, Thomosen said, and 98 percent of those women are
sober six months after treatment.

"I think the program is more successful than average because of the
length of their stay, their children can stay with them and we build
strong, lasting relationships with them all," she said.

However, getting funding to support the number of counselors,
caseworkers and specialists needed to provide such in-depth services
to families is difficult, Illg said.

"A few salaries would be worth what the state would save by having
mom and dad employed and getting them to the point where they don't
need food stamps or other assistance," he said. "Throwing money at a
problem doesn't solve anything, but if it makes fiscal sense we need to do it."

Also, Illg said the social stigma attached to drug use means many
addicts trying to stay clean are at best shunned , and at worst
trapped into a cycle of recurring abuse.

"It's like people's automatic reaction is stay away from that person,
they're a bad person," he said. "Let's say there's a mom who needs
treatment and is willing, but because of her criminal record she
can't get a license to drive herself there three times a week. People
would be a little more reluctant to drive her around than someone who
needs dialysis for a kidney problem, but they're both diseases that
can be helped."

Sloan said he's seen too many families come back through the court
system for the same addiction that brought them in the first place to
have much faith in rehabilitation.

"Sometimes I think social workers use the word 'success' in a narrow
time frame, but I suppose you can't track some of these things," he
said. "It's possible I'm magnifying the problem because I keep seeing
some come back weeks, months, years later."

But through 16 years of working with parents and children through the
court system, Sloan said he's also come to the conclusion that more
needs to be done to help addicted parents wean themselves off meth
and become productive.

"It's difficult to get people to put aside their prejudgements of
others. They say why can't you just stop and get yourself educated,
that's your responsibility. But they have children and that's where
we are -- I'm trying to find a way for this person to provide for the
children they gave birth to," he said. "Maybe they deserve it, but do
the babies who are born to them deserve it?"

"People will say this is a victimless crime, using drugs," he said.
"But the victims as I see it are these little tykes who are kind of
caught in the outrageous behavior of their parents."

Finding A Foundation

Seaton said now that she is out of treatment, she wants to get a job
to help support Jayson. She'll have to go back to school to earn her
GED, and then she'll have to decide exactly what she wants to do for
a career -- Seaton said she has never held a job before.

"I'm proud of myself for making it this far," she said. "I think I
can keep going."

She won't find much support from her family in this, she said,
because even those to whom she was closest still abuse meth, alcohol or both.

"I can't go around them at all," Seaton said. "I want to stay away
from them anyway because it's always been nothing but chaos."

Most of her former friends are now off-limits, too, because they
would most likely influence her to continue using.

"Before when I tried to stop, everywhere I went I'd see people I
knew. I'd tell them I didn't want to get high and they'd just laugh
at me," she said.

She said she and Thompson want to get married soon and move to Sioux
Falls so they can make a fresh start as a family of their own.

"It's hard to stay sober in the town you used in," Thompson said. "We
can't really run from our pasts, but we can make life better for our son."

But before everything else, Seaton has to fight for Jaden. On Monday,
Seaton is planning to attend a hearing to postpone arguments to
terminate her parental rights. If her efforts there don't succeed,
Oct. 11 is her last day in court -- and the last day she may have
legal custody over her daughter.