Delaware: Parents' joblessness takes toll on kids Drugs, depression among problems that can pile up

Sherita Lane pulled her daughter, Essence, into her lap and kissed her on the forehead. They have each other and not much else.

Lane's last full-time job was in 1999, as a bank clerical worker. It's been temp and part-time work since then, she explained. They are living with Lane's parents now, and they come here, to the Friendship House women's center in a Wilmington church basement, almost every day to look for a job.

"I try to keep Essence happy, but it's hard," said Lane, 27. "She has what she needs, but I know there's more things we need. I'm always running into something."

Five-year-old Essence is one of Delaware's estimated 57,000 children whose parents lack full-time, year-round work, according to a recently released annual report on the well-being of the nation's children. That figure, from 2003, represents 29 percent of the state's children, up from 25 percent in 2000.

The national figure was 33 percent in 2003, up from 32 percent in 2000.

The 2005 Kids Count Data Book, compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, also reported that 5,000 Delaware children are even more vulnerable because they live in homes where no parent has worked at all for the past year. They make up about 3 percent of all the state's kids.

Nationally, the report estimates that 4 million children, or 5 percent, live in homes where no parent has worked for a year. That figure is up by 1 million since 2000.

That instability takes a toll on children's physical and emotional health, said William O'Hare, who coordinated the 2005 Kids Count. The damage is complicated by the factors that hamper parents' job-search efforts, such as substance abuse, a prison record, domestic violence or depression, he said.

The effect on children when their parents go to prison is just starting to attract the interest of political leaders, despite the fact that the U.S. prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million since 1980, said Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

About 2 percent of U.S. children have at least one parent behind bars, he said. For minority children, the figure is almost 8 percent.

"We've paid shockingly little attention to the consequences to those children, in terms of their emotional development, their educational attainment, their new family status," he said.

It's common for the women who come to the Friendship House to be dealing with several issues at the same time, said Marcy Perkins, who runs the center in the basement of the Episcopal Church of Sts. Andrew and Matthew at the corner of Eighth and Orange streets. She and her husband, Bill Perkins, offer shelter and work programs for the city's homeless population through Friendship House.

"It really becomes a chicken and egg kind of question," Marcy Perkins said. "Are you taking drugs because you're depressed, or are you depressed because you're taking drugs? You've got to try and sort all that out."

One of the Friendship House programs is the Clothing Bank of Delaware, which collects, sorts and distributes donated clothing to homeless and low-income people. It employs recovering drug addicts and ex-inmates for 90 days while they find regular jobs.

"They're coming out of jail and you're trying to teach them a new way of living, without chaos and without fast money," Marcy Perkins said.

Lane said she's fortunate not to face any of those obstacles. But they are tripping up plenty of the other women sitting at the long brown tables around her.

An oasis for chaotic lives

The church basement isn't air conditioned, but it is cool, and a couple of fans sweeping over the room make this a respite from the sticky heat of the street. There's coffee brewing and newspaper help-wanted ads spread across the tables. Some women call about potential jobs, some fax applications and résumés to prospective employers, others chat about who's hiring.

Many of the women here are eager to tell their life stories, to explain the troubles that have befallen them and their own missteps that have added to their plight. They credit God, social workers and family members for helping them see a path out of years of unemployment, drug addiction, prostitution and homelessness.

It takes some prodding, though, to get the women talking about the price their children have paid for those lives. No one likes to admit their shortcomings as a mother.

Pam Rothwell lost her housekeeping job in February and hasn't worked since. She has a 2-year-old son and is expecting a baby girl around Thanksgiving. The boy's father abandoned them; the unborn girl's father is in prison.

"A lot of people don't understand how it affects your kids," said Rothwell, 29. "Your kids see you stressing. You try not to let your kids see you cry."

Rothwell said she spent a week in jail in May after several 8-year-old unpaid traffic fines caught up to her. Her record became an issue when she applied recently for a parking-lot attendant job. She didn't get it.

"People look at you like you can't change," Rothwell said. "They say it doesn't matter, but it really does."

Rothwell said her son understands enough about her unemployment to know they can't afford the little luxuries they once did. That gnaws at her, she said.

"I think about how I'm going to take care of my kids, how to make sure they have everything they need week to week," Rothwell said, her swollen belly showing beneath a prim, blue-checked dress. "I'm determined to find a job before I have this baby."

'My children were hurt'

In one corner of the center, Michele Lavoie works on a Friendship House mailing because the day's humidity and her asthma are keeping her from her Clothing Bank job. Wearing modest earrings and a cross on a chain, Lavoie doesn't look like she carries around the story she does.

For 20 years, Lavoie said, she abused marijuana and pills. She used crack cocaine for seven years. For the last three years of her life as an addict, she added heroin to the mix. She lived on the street and in motels. She stole and prostituted herself to feed her addiction.

"I couldn't stop what I was doing," said Lavoie, 35. "I prayed for God to take me out of this world because I couldn't stop."

Lavoie's two children, now ages 14 and 11, have lived with her mother since 1995. Her mother eventually adopted the children because Lavoie couldn't care for them. Her absence hurt and angered them, feelings they are just starting to resolve, she said.

In 2003, Lavoie's addiction landed her in Baylor Women's Correctional Institution near New Castle. There, she got into the state's substance-abuse treatment program, known as KEY. She has been clean and sober for 19 months.

"That's where I learned to change the way I think," Lavoie said.

About 80 percent of Delaware's prison inmates admit to having a substance abuse problem, while another 5 percent to 10 percent are still denying it, said Elizabeth Neal, deputy warden of the New Castle County women's work-release treatment center at Baylor. Most inmates get treatment through KEY and its companion program, Crest, which helps recovering addicts as they move back into the community.

The programs are praised in the Kids Count report as a successful model of long-term treatment. Inmates who completed both programs are half as likely to be arrested again and three times more likely to be drug-free than those outside the program after 18 months, the report found, citing research by the University of Delaware.

"There is so much devastation in their lives, and the most severe damage is to the children," Neal said.

Amy Hanner knows that now. The 36-year-old mother of three sat in an upstairs room at Plummer Community Correction Center in Wilmington and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. The Crest program helped Hanner get clean after a seven-year addiction to crack cocaine, she said.

"Once you become clear-minded, you feel things," Hanner said. "Once my real feelings started to come through, you realize: My children were hurt worse than me."

Hanner said her children were too worried and disturbed by her behavior to fully enjoy sports and friends. That thought fuels Hanner's resolve to stay drug free.

"I'm done. I'm tired. This is it," she said. "I'm not getting younger, and my kids aren't either."

Back at the Friendship House, Lane and her daughter, Essence, held each other a little tighter. Lane considered the future.

"In a few years, I see myself in a house, with a good job, doing something I like to do," Lane said.

Essence scooted a little higher into Lane's lap and buried her face in Lane's long hair. She starts kindergarten in August.

"I see her doing good in school," Lane said. "Things are hard right now, but they're going to get better."