Children Mental Health Recession 

Broken hearths: How the economy is endangering the health of our families

Partner: 
San Luis Obispo Tribune
Summary: 

Joblessness is a scourge that hits hard at workers trying to make a life for their families. But it also hits hard at the families themselves, including the children. In San Luis Obispo, children are acting up in school and at home, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, and suffering from mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, the institutions that normally serve families – schools, county agencies, churches and nonprofits – are grappling with budget cuts and are slashing services.

Impact Summary: 

Joblessness is a scourge that hits hard at workers trying to make a life for their families. But it also hits hard at the families themselves, including the children. In San Luis Obispo, children are acting up in school and at home, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, and suffering from mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, the institutions that normally serve families – schools, county agencies, churches and nonprofits – are grappling with budget cuts and are slashing services.

Results
Families showing signs of stress
Emily Bazar and Julie Lynem | September 17, 2010
Johnny and Tammi Menezes bought their shiny new Denali SUV in 2007, when Johnny’s concrete business was humming and he couldn’t hustle fast enough to pour floors for new commercial buildings. But by the end of that year, the leading edge of the recession began to batter the construction industry, and Johnny had to lay off 15 workers and a bookkeeper. “We were doing really good for a lot of years,” said Johnny, 40. “I couldn’t imagine being in this position.” Fast-forward three years. The Templeton family is three months behind on its $3,100 mortgage, has no health insurance and endures a constant barrage of phone calls from creditors. In July, the Denali was repossessed, with one daughter’s Nintendo DS gaming device and other belongings inside.
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Teen shoulders adult responsibilities
Emily Bazar, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | September 17, 2010
Porcelain dolls and stuffed animals vie for space on two shelves above Yessica Rodriguez’s bed, homage to a childhood that seems far away. “I don’t feel like a kid. I feel like an adult,” she said. Rodriguez, 16, holds two jobs, earning money to buy her own clothes and school supplies and help with the family’s bills. A soccer player, horror film aficionado and 11th-grader at Atascadero High School, Rodriguez is among a growing number of teens taking jobs to help their families get through the recession. “I feel like it’s my responsibility to help them,” she said. “I don’t like to see my parents worry. My mom gets sad sometimes.”
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San Luis Obispo County's middle class hit hard by economic crisis
Emily Bazar and Julie Lynem | September 17, 2010
While the economic downturn has pummeled families across the county, its impact on the middle class has surprised community advocates. In many cases, those families now are scrambling to provide the basics: food, electricity and clothing for the kids. • The number of people going to food pantries countywide has increased 40 percent in the past two years, said Carl Hansen, executive director of the Food Bank Coalition of San Luis Obispo County. Many of the new faces describe themselves as middle-class families. They are “in a state of shock,” he said. “Their whole identity is shaken to the core.”
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Trying times: What local experts see
Emily Bazar and Julie Lynem | September 17, 2010
Dr. Rene Bravo, San Luis Obispo pediatrician: “I’ve been around these woods for around 25 years, and I’ve never seen it like it is now. The stress on young families is enormous, and I would say that the economy has had a significant impact on them.” Patricia Oliveros, a family advocate at Judkins and Mesa middle schools in Pismo Beach and Arroyo Grande. She works for the nonprofit group The LINK.  “I had a couple of teachers who said ‘Why can’t they just behave? Why can’t they act normal?’ I said, ‘What is normal? Normal for them is getting home and having three different families in the living room or bedroom. Where do they do their homework? In the kitchen? Where?”
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San Luis Obispo County families are clinging to normal
Richard Kipling, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | September 18, 2010
Let’s keep it normal — for the kids’ sake, for family stability, for maintaining one’s place in the community. It’s a tired, fearful phrase whispered by stressed parents in tough times. Let’s not tell the world — or the kids — about our problems. Let’s keep private business private. But exactly how do you keep it normal when your income went out the door with your job, when there’s nowhere near enough money to pay the bills, when you’re months behind on rent or the mortgage, when the bank’s about to repossess your car, when you may have to surrender your home and yank your kids out of their school, their neighborhood, their world? Maybe, if you’re lucky, you still have that job, but now it pays 15 percent less than it did a year ago.
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For a San Miguel single mother of four, furlough brings host of fears
Julie Lynem | September 18, 2010
Elisa Becerra, a psychiatric technician at the California Men’s Colony for a decade, is accustomed to a certain level of stress. Each work day, upon stepping through the gates, she comes face to face with some of the prison’s most emotionally troubled inmates. Now, though, that stress has come home. Becerra, 32, made more than $50,000 a year before the state announced that it was furloughing employees, essentially cutting pay 15 percent. A single mother of four children — ages 2½ to 10 — she wondered how the family would survive on her shrinking monthly income.
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Los Osos family finds light in darkness
Emily Bazar, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | September 18, 2010
Wyatt and Hunter Nelson shrug off the financial troubles that have plagued their family for two years. “We’ve been in a money situation before,” said Wyatt, 12, a long-boarding enthusiast and eighth-grader at Los Osos Middle School. He jokes that it was easier for him to fall asleep the two times the electricity was shut off because the house got so dark. “I knew (my parents) were going to overcome it,” he said. Hunter, 10, a fifth-grader at Monarch Grove Elementary in Los Osos, describes his hands-off approach before disappearing into his room to play video games. “I just ignore the changes,” he said. “I don’t think about it.”
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Tables are turned on Paso Robles family counselor
Julie Lynem | September 18, 2010
Katy Griffin has had plenty of practice counseling families about economic uncertainty. As director of family and children’s ministries at the 1,200-member Highlands Church in Paso Robles for the past four years, Griffin, 40, fields phone calls from people who want to discuss job loss and its effect on their family life. During the current recession, Highlands has been hit hard by the needs of families in economic crisis. Griffin answers about three calls from families every week, she said, and each Sunday she hears the same thing from youth in her children’s ministry.
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Game of Life easier than the real thing
Julie Lynem | September 18, 2010
When the company where Jennifer Maw worked for more than two years as a soil and water analyst suddenly closed in July, it was a particularly harsh blow. Her husband had already been laid off from his job, and Maw knew the family would have to alter its lifestyle. Maw’s first priority, however, was maintaining a sense of normalcy for her three daughters: Annabell, 16, Savannah, 13, and Brianna, 10. Yet with her husband scrambling to find work earlier this summer, the kids were asking what the family was going to do and whether everything would be all right.
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Schools cope with spike in student homelessness
Emily Bazar, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | September 18, 2010
This recession is bringing families closer together. Literally. San Luis Obispo County residents who are struggling to pay their mortgages or make rent payments are increasingly moving in with relatives or friends, doubling or tripling up as a way to save money. “Some are people who, during the heyday of these easy mortgages, bought themselves a million-dollar-plus home, and now they can’t make the payments. So, they and their kids are sleeping on the couch at Grandma and Grandpa’s,” said Mike Miller, coordinator of at-risk programs for the Lucia Mar Unified School District. “It cuts across all social levels.”
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Trying times: How the kids are affected
Emily Bazar and Julie Lynem | September 18, 2010
Jennifer Maw, unemployed San Luis Obispo mother of five "My kids worry about not having the things that they need. We're trying to keep stuff as normal as possible. As adults, we have the responsibility to make sure that nothing for them is changing." Laurie Morgan, director of the South County S.A.F.E. Family Resource Centers in Arroyo Grande, Nipomo and Oceano “They worry about their parents. They have to grow up way too fast. They’re becoming almost like little adults and helping their parents problem solve. A lot of the parents we work with try to keep things normal, but a lot of times kids get dragged into that discussion of 'Where do we go? Do we go to the shelter? Do we stay in the car?' Those kinds of questions."
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Network of Support
Julie Lynem | September 19, 2010
Jobs lost. Mortgages in default. Dreams deferred. Faced with overwhelming obstacles during the worst economic crisis in decades, many San Luis Obispo County families are stressed to the breaking point. But they don’t have to tackle these challenges alone. A host of local ventures are stepping up to aid county residents, providing psychological, financial and educational assistance in an attempt to stop the pain and instill hope.
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Entrepreneurial program helps teens help their families
Emily Bazar, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | September 19, 2010
Jeremy Ritchie donned a white chef’s frock in Atascadero High School’s teaching kitchen one recent afternoon and whipped up two kinds of pizza and lots of sinful sweets. The pizzas were for the other teens working with him. The brownies and oatmeal raisin cookies were for hungry local residents willing to plunk down money for a sweet treat and a good cause. That cause is Teens at Work, a program that allows Jeremy, 16, and other teens to transform their budding entrepreneurialism into paying jobs.
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Advice for Mom and Dad is only a phone call away
Julie Lynem | September 19, 2010
Bill Spencer has heard a multitude of stories from anxious moms and dads. Some are barely scraping by with several jobs or trying desperately to find work. Others need help controlling their rebellious teens or want to know why their children are acting out, he said. But such reactions by children are not unusual when parents bring their stress home, said Spencer, a volunteer for a new helpline that assists parents.
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Financial lessons come to the classroom
Emily Bazar, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | September 19, 2010
Taryn Kalman has a baby-sitting clientele of 51 children but still found time to line up $11,000 in scholarships for her first year at Cal Poly. Yet even this financially savvy 18-year-old was surprised when she learned about the various kinds of insurance she’d need over her lifetime, from health to home. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I thought there was only car insurance,’ ” said the recent San Luis Obispo High School graduate. Taryn learned about insurance, how to budget and save, the difference between good and bad credit and how to avoid identity theft in the nonprofit Junior Achievement program that offers hands-on financial lessons to students in some area schools.
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Out of work, but not out of inspiration
Julie Lynem | September 19, 2010
Here’s what Dorothy Nelson knew. She knew that her husband likely would lose his job in construction, an industry hard hit by the recession. The Templeton resident knew they had two children to support, a 16-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter. She also knew the family had a mortgage to pay and medical bills from her husband’s two surgeries and daughter’s hospitalization for asthma. And, finally, she knew that starting her own business was a huge risk. Still, she took it. Even before she found out that her own job teaching parenting classes through the Atascadero Unified School District would be eliminated this spring, she thought of a way to continue her passion and generate income to help support her family.
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Counselors chart a path back
Julie Lynem | September 19, 2010
In the early 1990s, David Draggoo’s stress peaked when he lost his job as a draftsman, forcing him to choose another career in social services and his family to downsize to a smaller home. He and his wife reluctantly explained to their children that they would have to make friends at a new school and that they may not have the nicest clothes. In the end, they got through it. “What we decided to do was to be open and honest about it with the kids,” he said. “This was something we were all going to do together, tighten up things and make changes.”
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Editorial: Don’t make things worse for children
The Tribune editorial staff | September 21, 2010
There is a temptation to romanticize times of economic crisis — to focus on how families learn to get by with less and gain a new appreciation of small pleasures once taken for granted. That’s true to an extent. Certainly, kids can live without video games, iPods and skinny jeans. But food, health care, education and a decent, safe place to live are not luxury items that kids can do without. Yet as The Tribune’s recent three-day series, Broken Hearths, pointed out, a growing number of kids can’t even count on having a warm bed at night.
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