The College of Education has begun research on the effects of parental drug use on young children and is developing assistance programs that could be put in place by the state to help those families.
The project is made possible by a $575,829 grant from Health and Human Services, awarded on Oct. 1.
Jane Squires, an associate professor with the early intervention program, will direct the study. She said she hopes the research will expose holes in the child protection systems and establish a standard protocol for doctors to quickly identify children who might be affected by familial drug abuse.
“The idea of this grant is that hospitals and protective services and treatment programs have procedures that are working together so that kids are getting screened and getting protected,” she said.
She said she hopes the program will enable doctors to assess children in the first days after birth so that they can get the help that is needed for development and a functioning family.
For the first two years, the study will focus on Lane County, with Jackson County examined the third year. Squires said she hopes HHS will extend the grant so the study can be conducted on a national scale, but she added that results would have country-wide implications.
The COE specializes in research on early childhood development and assessment. It developed the Ages and Stages Questionnaire that allows parents of young children to evaluate their child at home, using questions such as “If you hand your child a toy, does she wave it around?” The questionnaire is now used around the world.
Squires said this project is particularly important here in Oregon, where more people per capita are in rehabilitation for methamphetamine use than anywhere else in the country, according to an Oct. 3, 2004 Oregonian article. Meth use by parents has swamped child protection agencies; Squires said meth was a factor in 71 percent of cases of kids placed in foster care.
Although the drug is acknowledged as a huge problem, very little is known about the impacts of prenatal meth use on children, she said.
“There tends to be a lot of very early irritability, crying – that sort of thing,” she said. “But about cognitive or thinking skills, we don’t really know yet.”
The COE will partner with the Relief Nursery; the Early Childhood Coordination Agency for Referrals, Evaluations and Services; and the Childhood Development and Rehabilitation Center.
Judy Newman, co-director of EC CARES, said the study will be an important step in having a standard procedure for evaluating children early and figuring out which children need services most.
“We would like to do the best possible job of identifying kids that need our services,” Newman said. “We want to make sure we can reach out to those kids to get the best possible outcome because we believe the sooner, the better.”
EC CARES is an early childhood special education program that serves children with special needs from birth to age 5.
Participation in the study will be voluntary, but Squires feels many women will cooperate.
“Sometimes having a baby is really a life-changing event, and if they’ve been trying to get off drugs, seeing that there’s another person to be responsible for can be enough to motivate them – get them into treatment – to try to change things in their lives that need to be changed,” Squires said.
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