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A recent report ranked Oklahoma 41st in the country for the rate of children in poverty. Many local organizations are stepping in to fill the void.
Jessica Shenoi, a student at Darnaby Elementary School, won first place for this drawing in the second- and third-grade category of Family & Children’s Services’ annual poster contest in 2003.
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No one has to tell Rachel Atkinson about difficult childhoods. She had one of her own. Her parents divorced when she was a teen, so she lived with her father, where she wasn’t well supervised; she got kicked out of high school and married young.
She has found herself married three times: divorced as a teenager, widowed young and currently separated, primarily because of money problems, she says. Atkinson used drugs during her first marriage but was able to kick the habit following her divorce.
She’s 95 percent sure her marriage will survive, but she wants to start working just to prove that she can provide for her children, who are 6 and 7. Until then, the family is living in poverty and trying to stretch government assistance throughout the month.
Atkinson never had much education to rely upon, having dropped out of school in 10th grade. After her second husband’s death, she turned to the very drugs that had taken his life.
“I was mad at God,” she says. “I was mad at everybody. I went off the deep end. I started drugs worse than before.”
Through all of her hardships, she always tried to help her children. She knew a woman who would take her child with her to a crack house and hide drugs in her bra on the way out. Never, Atkinson says, did she hurt her children that much.
Having the drugs in her home was bad enough, she says, so she was careful never to expose her children to other people who were selling and using. She kept her children bathed and fed.
A plea for help
Atkinson convinced herself that she was a good parent, until four years ago, when she felt her chest tightening after a three-day binge. She thought she might die right there in her bedroom and realized that her young sons would find her and be left without either parent.
“I dropped to my knees and asked God to help me,” she says.
As an answer to her prayer, in July 2006 Atkinson saw an interview on the noon news. The woman being interviewed was discussing Safe Care, an in-home program offered by The Parent Child Center of Tulsa to provide parenting education.
Atkinson picked up the phone and called.
“Nothing seemed to be like I wanted it,” she says. “When I saw the lady on TV, I took the initiative.”
She was matched with Johnnie Rodgers-Highsmith, a family support worker at The Parent Child Center. Rodgers-Highsmith made weekly visits to Atkinson’s home in Jenks, helping her learn a variety of parenting skills — from when to go to the emergency room versus the doctor’s office to how to childproof her home. She learned how to have fun with her children on a rainy day and how to discipline them appropriately.
“She (Rodgers-Highsmith) became more than just somebody who came out every week,” Atkinson says. “She was my friend. She really cared about me and my family.”
Other than one caseworker, “I never really had anyone like that in my life,” Atkinson says.
For the last four years, Atkinson is proud to have been free of drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Recently graduating from Safe Care, she is one of the program’s success stories.
Life still isn’t easy, though. Without her husband’s income, she and her boys are living in an apartment, back on food stamps and living off the boys’ Social Security survivor’s benefits. Without child care, she can’t get to Tulsa for career training. She jokes that she has come to know her church’s secretary personally because she has visited the church’s clothes closet so frequently for help.
Atkinson isn’t alone in her struggle to raise children in poverty. Oklahoma ranks 41st in the United States for the rate of children in poverty, and it has the dubious distinction of having fallen two notches since 2001, according to the Every Child Matters Education Fund’s report “We Can Do Better: Child Abuse and Neglect Deaths in America.”
More than 22 percent of children 18 and younger live in poverty, defined as a family of four earning $20,000 or less, and 10 percent live in extreme poverty, which means a family income of $10,000 or less.
Poverty is the single biggest predictor of child abuse, the report states.
In 2008, the Oklahoma Child Death Review Board investigated 35 deaths of children that were directly related to child abuse or neglect. Ten of those were physical abuse, nine were drowning and five were vehicular related. Of the 59 near-death cases reviewed, the main type of injury was from physical abuse.
Only three states have higher rates of child abuse and neglect deaths. And nearly every report, including that of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, shows that the numbers of deaths are often underreported and the response inconsistent across the nation.
As an example, in Oklahoma, child abuse is technically limited to abuse by a parent or someone caring for the child. Therefore, abuse by a stranger — typically the stories that get the biggest headlines — are not even counted in the official abuse statistics.
“We really don’t know the extent of child abuse in our community,” says Barbara Findeiss, executive director of the Child Abuse Network (CAN). “We know what DHS tells us, but we really don’t know the full story.”
According to the state Department of Human Services, the number of confirmed cases of child abuse had been decreasing across the state, Findeiss says. However, “over the last six years, CAN averaged 140 children per month, but in March, April and May CAN served over 200 new children each month,” she says. “They were not good months for Tulsa’s kids.”
Statistically, only nine states have more uninsured children than Oklahoma, according to Child Health USA, a report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration.
