Residential treatment center

America's treatment of at-risk, emotionally disturbed children receives attention periodically in the media as well as at national conferences, workshops, task forces, and the the professional literature. Solutions are offered, successful programs reported. Sensitivities of educators, child welfare workers, clinicians, and the general public are aroused. Yet the problem continues. Today's solutions become tomorrow's failures. Thousands of cast off children are referred each year to foster homes, residential treatment centers, psychiatric hospitals, or juvenile detention.
Some of these children somehow survive and become responsible adults. Others remain on the fring of an affluent society, trapped within the bonds of drugs, poverty, unemployment, and a welfare system designed to help them but often perpetuating their problems from one generation to the next.

Five years ago I left a residential treatment center which I had helped to structure. It was typical of other centers funded nationally by child welfare agencies. Many of the children were streetwise kids from the inner city. Most were the products of broken homes and dysfunctional families. Most had suffered physical and sexual abuse. All had psychiatric diagnoses. All were emotionally vulnerable, damaged, easily led, scared, tough, belligerent, "in-your-face" children, old beyond their years. The vignettes, poems, and stories which will ensue were written at the time I worked in the program. I did not publish them at the time because the children might have been identified. That seems highly unlikely now. I will pepper this blog with some of these now dated but still relevant pieces. Today I help provide mental health services to a school district in a somewhat economically distressed area. I see the same problems that I became familiar with before. Perhaps in a few years I will present these stories as well. Today I remember Tommy.

He shakes down older folk for cash.
He stole a twenty dollar bill
And Mary hickeyed up his neck.

Abused repeatedly by men,
Just fourteen but he too has become An abuser
Passing the baton to future toughs,
An endless relay race.

Toughest kid on the wing,
Mom visited today
Broken toothed crone with four broken kids.
(Four too many for her to cope.)
So he cried when she left
And clutched his teddy bear at night.