Quality | 2009.09.13
Babies damaged by alcohol culture
Ryan and Tracey both suffered brain damage in the womb. Their adoptive mother, writing anonymously here, fears the children of Britain\'s bingeing generation face a life of emotional trauma
When Martin Narey, chief executive of the children\'s charity Barnardo\'s, called for many more children to be taken into care at birth to stop them being damaged beyond repair by inadequate parenting, I thought of Ryan and Tracey (not their real names), two of our three adopted children. Our son has just passed his 21st birthday in prison. He is on remand, awaiting trial for various violent offences. Tracey, his 19-year-old half-sister, is doing better. But if she were not living at home, she would undoubtedly be putting herself in dangerously threatening sexual situations. She is simply not capable of living safely on her own.
Through the arduous and harrowing process of raising them, we have come to realise that children can be "damaged beyond repair" long before they are born. And the cure may require of society much more dramatic policies than merely taking babies away from inadequate parents.
We adopted Ryan as a one-year-old, a frail little chap who had been taken into intensive care because his birth mother had badly neglected him in the first couple of weeks after he was born. He had been fostered for almost all of his short life. The social workers told us that his mum "had learning difficulties" and had been abusing alcohol and illegal drugs.
Apart from his small size, Ryan\'s difficulties first surfaced when he was three. He was terribly clumsy – he kept tripping himself up each time he tried to run. Other indicators – delayed speech and concentration problems – took me to our GP. An occupational therapist told us our son was severely dyspraxic, a problem of damage to nerve cells in the brain
Tracey was born to Ryan\'s birth mother 16 months later. Social workers took her from her mother straight away. We adopted her, too. She also had co-ordination problems, and was strangely passive, but from the beginning she was a determined child.
Over the years our children\'s problems became more apparent. We sought in vain for an explanation of their behaviour. Only recently have we begun to suspect the factors that have probably caused the nightmare that we (and they) have endured. If our explanation is right, it has important implications for government policy on alcohol. Only recently has it become apparent that the very different quality of education and support that our two children received may explain why Tracey seems to cope better with her heritage than Ryan with his.
Tracey was the luckier one. It did not seem so at the time. She behaved so aggressively at primary school that her headteacher described her as "an animal" and "evil". She persuaded us to get Tracey a "statement of educational needs". Then followed several years during which Tracey\'s behaviour worsened and we went from professional to professional. At 11, she was diagnosed as having an autistic spectrum disorder and severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As a result, she was admitted to a school for children with special needs and was provided with a caring and supportive secondary education, suited to a child with her diff
iculties.
Ryan stayed in mainstream schools. At secondary school he couldn\'t cope, and retreated from his difficulties and the ridicule of the other kids by finding cannabis. He would go missing and roamed the streets. At home he cried, threatened to kill himself, talked of how much he hated school, how the other boys and teachers laughed at him. His drug- taking progressed to "skunk", although we didn\'t know it. We knew he was unhappy, and pleaded for him to be statemented. His secondary school refused to co-operate. He was truanting a great deal, and although we didn\'t realise it he was already involved in petty crime.
The crimes gradually became more serious. We pleaded with Ryan to stop; the magistrates told him they never wanted to see him again in court; the youth justice officers tried to reason with him. The crimes continued, sometimes even the same day he was sentenced, or the day after he had been in court. One of the youth justice team told me: "Your son\'s going to prison." I wanted to scream at the man that it was his job to stop this, not advise me to accept the inevitable.
Then Ryan hit the alcohol. Immediately the offences became violent. When he got drunk or high on something, he hit, punched and swore at us and broke things. Windows and mirrors were smashed, door panels broken, all of us were bruised. Then he began slashing himself with razors, knives and any sharp object he could find. He stole from us all. In between the drunken bouts he was affectionate and loving, scared of what was happening, but unable to explain it to us. He clearly didn\'t understand it himself.
At school, Tracey\'s problems persisted. On one occasion she locked herself and other classmates in the library and the helpless teachers could only watch through the glass door as she swung, whooping, from the low roof beams over the other children\'s heads, jumping down from time to time to spin the little boy with cerebral palsy round and round in his wheelchair in frighteningly fast circles. She bit, hit, kicked, swore at and punched other children, her teachers and us. She was banned from swimming after she held another child\'s head under the water.
Thanks to the wondrously long-suffering and understanding teachers in her secondary school, however, this malevolent and self-destructive human whirlwind metamorphosed slowly into a young lady who generally behaved well. But in one respect, she shared her brother\'s problems.
After she left school, she began drinking alcohol with friends, always away from home. We would find her so drunk that she could not stand up, lying in the middle of the road. She was often in the town centre, sprawled on a bench with alcoholics, drug dealers and homeless people. Tracey increasingly seemed drawn to putting herself into sexually threatening or exploitative situations with men, despite our attempts to keep her safe. She simply did not seem to understand the danger she was in, or what might happen to her. On one occasion, I found her with a group of about seven men in the park. I told her to come with me, but she refused at first. It was only when we were well away from the group that she admitted how frightened she had been.
But why have our children had so much difficulty, especially when affected by alcohol? We have sought an explanation for 20 years. Despite what child psychotherapists told us, we know that it is not simply because of their adoption. Our oldest child, also adopted, is a hard-working and conscientious young woman with a university degree and a steady boyfriend. For Ryan and Tracey, the diagnoses we were given did not seem to fit what we observed.
If Ryan had Asperger\'s syndrome, where was the characteristically obsessive behaviour? If Tracey was autistic, why did she enjoy meeting others so much? And why did alcohol turn both of them into aggressive, violent and antisocial beings when other autistic or Asperger\'s kids we knew would instead shun society and turn inwards on themselves?
It was while we were tussling with these questions that we came across the condition known as foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). It affects children whose mothers drink alcohol during pregnancy. We discovered that research into FASD had been carried out for many years in the US and Canada. Professor Ann Streissguth of University of Washington School of Medicine, who began her research on foetal alcohol effects 30 years ago, found that children affected by prenatal alcohol exhibit anger and hyperactivity, impulsive behaviour and poor judgment. They have difficulty learning from the consequences of their behaviour and keeping themselves safe, their sexual behaviour is inappropriate and they have low self-esteem. A high proportion fail at school, abuse drugs and alcohol, and have trouble with the law. Few manage to live independently.
Suddenly many characteristics of our children\'s behaviour started to make sense. We knew that their birth mother was abusing alcohol and illegal drugs before Ryan was born, and she continued until Tracey was born. Could it be that the brains of both children were severely damaged before they were born? As we read further on this subject, we found that foetal alcohol spectrum disorder is the leading cause of preventable birth defects, and the most common known cause of cognitive impairment in children. A report published in 2007 by the British Medical Association, entitled \'Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders\', suggested that, worldwide, perhaps one in every 100 babies is born with FASD.
We can no longer have Ryan living with us. With no community support, no protected accommodation and no one apart from us, his family, who will help him, he will join the many others in our prisons who suffer the same disabilities that Ryan\'s birth mother has given him.
Tracey could, unsupported, continue to place herself in sexually threatening situations, or among people who can endanger her – especially if she returns to drinking alcohol. With our continued support, and while she stays at home, she appears to be maturing and becoming an adult. She was given a temporary job by a major supermarket, owing to her disabled status, and has just been offered a permanent post with another. She still lashes out violently at us sometimes, but now only verbally, and she has learned to control herself at work – even when faced by violent and angry customers. She also says she does not ever want to drink alcohol again.
But there are many Ryans and Traceys. Two support groups aim to publicise their plight: FASawareUK and NOFAS-UK. But we found few medical experts, in our long search for help, who knew anything about the long-term impact on adults whose mothers drank while pregnant. And yet in the UK we have one of Europe\'s highest levels of alcohol use and binge-drinking among adolescents, and the highest rate of teenage pregnancies. Yet we are not even collecting statistics on the numbers born with FASD.
The consequence is that the UK is in danger of producing a generation of children born with irreversible brain damage caused by their mothers drinking during pregnancy. Permanently brain-damaged in the womb they will be impulsive, unable to plan or see the consequences of their actions, or to empathise with their victims; and too often they may end up committing senseless crimes.
And in the UK we are doing almost nothing to stop it.
All family members\' names have been changed.
Pregnancy and children
• Critics claim pregnant women are given conflicting advice. The Department of Health line is that no alcohol is the best policy but the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence advises not to drink for the first three months. It says after that the occasional drink will not harm the foetus.
• The main effect of FASD is permanent damage to the central nervous system and especially the brain.
• Widespread occurrence of FASD in South Africa was blamed partly on a system, now outlawed, that involved vineyards paying part of workers\' wages in alcohol.
• For further information, visit www.nofas-uk.org ; or www.fasaware.co.uk
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/s[...]etal-alcohol-spectrum-disorder
