Surviving Family Tree
Jill began buying pain pills at age 18, the same year she graduated from Butler Senior High School.
She did not have a prescription.
Life got worse before it got better for Jill, whose real name is not being published in this article to protect her identity.
Today, you would never know Jill's struggle with addiction seeing her welcoming smile and hearing her confident voice. But hers is just one of countless comeback stories of young people whose lives have been turned upside down by addiction.
Jill describes the home she grew up in as abusive, and in the process of beating her addiction uncovered repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. In her early 20s, life felt bleak.
“Truly, I thought I was going to be dead by 30,” she said.
Getting sober
At 23, Jill finally managed sobriety with the help of a rehab program. Six months clean, she moved into a shared living space for women recovering from addiction.
Jill was pregnant during her stay at that home. The father was another addict she met in rehab. Right after moving out, she gave birth and moved back in with her mother.
“I didn't want to raise my daughter in a three-quarters house with a bunch of other women,” Jill said.
Four months into motherhood, an argument with her mom got both Jill and her infant kicked out.
Her relationship with her mother is rocky. Jill still doesn't speak to her father. The couple went through a divorce when she was young.
Jill said it was an old boyfriend of her mom's who molested her. The path to recovery forced her to deal with those old feelings, along with other trauma.
“I was molested when I was 4 or 5 years old,” Jill said. “My parents were divorced. I just grew up in an abusive home.”
For so many, addiction arrives as the world's worst hand-me-down.
Molestation, neglect or even just childhood exposure to substance abuse can throw a switch in the brain, rapidly stacking the odds against a child. So often, society's next generation to be lost to addiction is raised by those with their own substance problems.
Today, Jill is fighting that cycle. Her daughter is already without her biological father — he relapsed — so she's busy making sure nothing else goes wrong.
“When I was younger, I swore that I would have a kid with someone I knew I would be with for the rest of my life,” Jill said. “Not raise a kid in a broken home. You always hear the statistics. Two addicts have a kid together and it increases the kid's chances. That scares me. I know how addiction is now, and I don't want that for my daughter.”
Jill's living room holds a stash of baby toys. Her daughter's face can be seen beaming from a framed photo on the wall — through which the family can hear their neighbors. They're in transitional housing filled with recovering addicts — but life is looking up.
At 25, Jill is about two-and-a-half years sober. Her daughter just turned 1 year old.
“She's the happiest little girl ever,” Jill said. “Just seeing how happy she is, it keeps me going. I know only I can keep myself sober, but she's who I fight for.”
Beating the oddsNot every kid in Butler who grows up to be an addict has a chance to beat it like Jill. And not every child of an addict in the county is lucky enough to avoid coexisting with their parents' drug abuse.It is clear, according to educators, social workers and law enforcers, that there are plenty of children in Butler County growing up around addiction.Asked for data, those workers tend to point to the county's Child and Youth Services. When child endangerment of any sort is reported in Butler County — including parental substance abuse — a red notification pops up on computer monitors at CYS.To give a sense of scope to this report, Charlie Johns, the agency's director, pieced together some figures on the workload.Roughly 70 percent of cases handled by CYS somehow involve drugs or alcohol abuse, he said.With that in mind, the agency's caseworkers are assigned about 70 to 100 cases to investigate per month. Some of those come from law enforcement, but many are direct results of reports to services such as Pennsylvania's ChildLine hot line.Not all of those result in action, but many do. At any given time, Johns said, the agency is managing about 110 to 120 children in out-of-home placement. That 70 percent figure directly applies, he said.“If you were to draw a conclusion as to why a family is involved with us right now, chances are there's some kind of addiction issue,” Johns said.Children of addictsButler County Children's Center, which provides and oversees HeadStart programs in town, doesn't have readily available and reliable data to establish the scope, but administrators certainly know there are the children of addicts among their ranks.“A lot of children are being raised by grandparents currently,” said Elisa Spadafora, CEO of the children's center. “There's an increase.”Both Spadafora and Emily Snow, the center's family engagement enrollment director, said the opioid crisis is a focus of HeadStart at the federal level, and that focus is true in Butler County too.“Everyone is affected by this, everywhere,” Snow said. “I even have someone in my family affected.”Statistics speakNational data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration suggests that one in eight children in the United States lives with a parent with a substance abuse disorder. The statistic remained roughly consistent for children ages 3 through 17.The one-in-eight figure applies to parents addicted to either drugs or alcohol or both. For alcoholism only, the figure is one in 10 children. For drugs, it's one in 35.In Pennsylvania, the 2016-17 National Survey of Children's Health results suggest that about 8.2 percent of children have lived with someone who has a problem with drugs or alcohol.Results from the Pennsylvania Youth Survey offer further insight. Participating school districts ask eighth-, 10th- and 12th- graders various questions about drug use and other behaviors. The surveys are anonymous. The latest available results are from 2017.According to the Butler Area School District's results, about 22.6 percent of students who have used alcohol said their parents provided it. That's in line with the statewide average of 23.1 percent.Of Butler students, 92.7 percent said their parents would disapprove of using prescription drugs not prescribed to them. The state average is 93.6 percent.About 33.6 percent said they've known more than one adult who has used marijuana, crack, cocaine or other such drugs. That's higher than the statewide average of 27.2 percent. A similar disparity presents when Butler students are asked if they know adults who have gotten drunk or high. The district's students said “yes” in 70.6 percent of surveys, compared to 57.9 percent statewide.Keenan McGaughey, principal of Center Avenue Community School, said he has seen an increasing trend.“The trend I've seen is that the increased needs for kids with mental health needs has been so drastically on the rise that sometimes you feel more like a firefighter than an educator,” McGaughey said. “Some of that is related to the impact drugs have on families being in foster care or grandparents being granted guardianship. We have a number of families here in those circumstances.”Living with addictsAt Center Avenue, McGaughey spends much of his time helping special education students identify and overcome challenges in their lives. Living with addicts is far too often one of those challenges.“These kids, sometimes their families pass away as a result of their addiction, and as much you hate to say it, it's like a blessing in disguise because they get into a great foster family and their lives turn around,” McGaughey said. “It's a vicious cycle sometimes that these students are being put through.”Jill's family certainly endures its share of addiction. She said several of her close relatives have drinking problems, including her mother. One cousin died of an overdose. Another is still using. Some have killed themselves.Jill agreed to tell her story, she said, out of hope that others might feel encouraged to beat their addiction.Jill found sobriety. She credits drug rehabilitation, funded through Butler County's Drug and Alcohol program, with getting her sober. Various support groups help keep her that way. Amy Cirelli, family development specialist at the Lighthouse Foundation, who works with Jill, points to the young woman as an example of recovery. Cirelli sat in on interviews with Jill and verified her story.Life has improved for Jill, and she believes Butler County has what it needs to break the cycle for others, and to save more children like her little girl.“I never want her to see me pick up a drink or a drug,” Jill said. “That's my goal.”
