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No Comments [ Add Comment ]Utah could look to Arizona to learn how to prevent child abuse
By Neal HumphreyWhen orga
nizations like the United Way conduct the occasional needs analysis with community leaders, the expected inventory of social challenges emerge as high priority concerns. The top of the list will include such issues as overcrowding in schools, drugs, gangs, pornography, divorce, housing costs, etc.
But there's a new and rising concern that's making the list: insufficient parenting skills. That's remarkable because Utah is as family-oriented a state as we have in this country. But community leaders are facing the ugly fact that there are too many Utah fathers and mothers who just don't know how to be effective parents.
The most grisly symptom of this problem is the rate of child abuse in Utah. In a study three years ago we ranked No. 8 in the nation in substantiated cases of child abuse. A child in Utah is almost twice as likely to be abused as the average American kid. In 2004, Utah taxpayers spent $1.4 billion on child abuse.
Or, to put it another way, child abuse personally cost you about $600. For myself, I'd rather spend that kind of money on a hot pair of skis, a fly- fishing outfit or a better-than-average Labrador retriever pup.
Of course, the highest cost is paid by the victims of child abuse and neglect. Those children can be so scarred that they are very likely to grow up not knowing better and become abusers themselves.
This is what's going on in your neighborhood. By the time you finish reading this newspaper, pour yourself another cup of coffee and head for work, one or two children in Utah will have suffered a sufficiently vicious level of abuse that the incident will end up being reported and substantiated.
There's a terrible price for the kind of insufficient parenting that leads to adverse childhood experiences.
The critical adverse childhood experiences include growing up in a household where there is some combination of recurrent emotional and/or sexual abuse, a parent who abuses alcohol or drugs, members of the family who are in jail, chronically depressed, suicidal, or are institutionalized or mentally ill. The list also includes a mother being subjected to violence, an absent parent, or neglect, whether it's emotional or physical.
Some durable kids grow up with such adverse childhood experiences and still manage to turn out as mature, sane and productive adults.
However, if the landscape of childhood has as few as four of those adverse childhood experiences, there is often a direct correlation to such life-threatening behaviors as smoking, severe obesity, physical inactivity, depression, suicide attempts, alcoholism, illicit drug use, injected drug use, having 50 or more sexual partners and, of course, STDs.
Now, I'm not a person who often suggests a government program is the right way to fix things, but our neighbor to the south, Arizona, has an outreach to families at-risk that has proven enormously effective. It's called "Healthy Families Arizona." Healthy Families Arizona has the daunting goals of preventing child abuse and neglect, promoting child health and development, and enhancing family functioning. And they're getting it done.
A family with a newborn child that also is assessed to have significant risk factors for insufficient parenting skills and abuse is offered Healthy Family services for the child's first five years of life.
The results have been a long list of positive and measurable outcomes. For example, last year 99.24 percent of the participating families had no confirmed cases of child abuse or neglect. The participating families were even more inclined to have their children immunized than the average Arizona family.
The Healthy Family program works because it's voluntary, family- driven and community-based. And in the category of closing the barn door before the horses get out, for every tax dollar spent on the Healthy Family program, the state of Arizona saves $16 tax dollars that would have been spent later on the consequences of abuse and neglect. That's smart money spent.
And, of course, the lives saved from abuse and neglect are priceless.
If our state leaders want Utah to be known as a family-friendly state, they need to get past the rhetoric and start putting our money where their mouth is.
And as a disturbing final note for most Utahns, the only presidential contender with a long-term, consistent, and substantial track record of experience with early childhood intervention and care is Sen. Hillary Clinton.
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