Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Rosemary Tisch (left) and Mary Crocker Cook will lead workshops for the gang task force in February.

Ripple Effect

One woman's search for help uncovers more
and more connections

By Sandy Sims

Recovering from alcoholism is tough. It's even tougher when you are a mom and you have young children. Rosemary Tisch's daughters were very young when she began her recovery from alcoholism 15 years ago. After getting herself sober, she read about the effects of her disease on children of alcoholics, and she knew her family needed help.

"People think that when the drinking stops, things will be just fine, and that is often not true. It does get better, but sometimes it gets worse before it gets better," says Tisch, a Saratoga resident. These are people newly in recovery dealing with emotional issues and trying to be parents on top of that, and their children have likely inherited physical, mental or emotional problems.

When Tisch began searching for help for her kids, there was little available in Santa Clara County. Since then, she has developed and nurtured a number of programs for children affected by alcoholism. She founded Kids Are Special (KAS), which today is under the directorship of Eastfield Ming Quong Children's Treatment Center. She has trained KAS leaders in Russia and Mexico. She has spearheaded a program for pregnant teens called Young Mothers Are Strong. She sits on the San Jose Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force and the National Prevention Task Force. She is the director of the Family Education Foundation here in Santa Clara County and has also become an expert on fetal alcohol syndrome. Recently, she teamed up with Los Gatan Mary Crocker Cook. In February they will be training members of the mayor's gang task force to implement training for juvenile offenders, much of that training based on work Tisch has done since she began her personal search for community resources to help children of alcoholic parents.

In the beginning, Tisch hooked up with Mary English, who headed up the Alcohol Family Program at O'Connor Hospital. Under the wing of English's program, Tisch flew to the Midwest to train with the group Children Are People. She and English used that model as a basis for Kids Are Special.

English ran the children's part, with Tisch's daughters in the first groups. Tisch ran the parents' groups. "I seemed like the best one to lead the parents groups because I was just days ahead of them," Tisch recalls. With a master's degree in clinical psychology, she had the academic training behind her.

These groups would become a cornerstone for work that she had no idea was still ahead of her.

The two women set up educational support groups of 10 children each that met for 10 weeks. The process was highly structured, with each meeting focusing on one issue. No lectures, almost no videos, no books--just activities such as role playing or games to teach the children how to communicate, how to take care of themselves, how to identify feelings and how to figure out when it's safe to express them. They learned about chemical dependency and how it affects each member of the family. In fact, one role-play shows how a healthy family gradually changes as the parents become dependent on drugs or alcohol. Through this activity, children are able to identify the role they have taken in the family system. Companion parent groups were set up with similar activities.

As a result of these groups, children often find the right time to say "Mom or Dad, I feel really angry when you come home and you are drunk." In several instances, Tisch says, "the kid says this just once, and the parent heads for recovery."

Since its inception 14 years ago, KAS has been evaluated by the state, which found that the program helps children increase their self-esteem, helps family functioning improve and helps improve the relationship the children have with their peers.

With these outstanding results, the model has gained national and international recognition. In fact, it has been distributed by UNICEF to all its offices. Tisch helped set up a replication in the San Lorenzo School District of Hayward and one in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has been to Russia several times to train leaders.

Not only has the model for KAS spread to other places, but it is reaching even deeper as it is adapted for other issues. Planned Parenthood, for instance, came to Tisch, saying that most teen moms are daughters of alcoholics. They wanted her to adapt KAS to these girls to help prevent a second pregnancy. Tisch, Planned Parenthood and various community agencies added information to the KAS model, and a new program called Young Mothers Are Strong (YMAS) was born.

Kathryn Page, school psychologist and director of Family Education Foundation's Teen Prevention Programs, has led 16 YMAS groups. "These girls run the gamut as far as trusting anyone," Page says. "They are tough, always on guard, often members of gangs. They have been at the mercy of their world. They have sex because the guys want sex." Once they are pregnant they have no choices--no abortion, no adoption, no sense of ownership about their bodies.

Through the YMAS groups, these girls are beginning to take charge of their lives. Eva, a teen mom who used to be a member of a gang, says, "I used to keep everything inside. I couldn't trust anybody. I used to miss school and was never on time." In fact, she quit school. Now she says, "Everything in my family has changed. I communicate better with my parents and my brother."

Even though she is 20, she is back in high school to finish. "I want to go to
college and become a counselor," Eva says. She is well on her way because she is
co-leading one of the new YMAS groups at Broadway High School in San Jose.

The YMAS groups have spawned two other programs, Young Women Are Strong for teens who are not yet pregnant and Young Men Are Strong, a men's group to help prevent teen pregnancy.

Nine years after she founded Kids Are Special, Tisch went to Seattle to learn more about fetal alcohol syndrome and its effects. Seattle is the only place where research is being done on these children.

There, Tisch learned that fetal alcohol syndrome is a diagnosable and treatable problem. It is perhaps the most serious physical result of alcoholism and is caused by a mother drinking during pregnancy. The amount of alcohol she drinks and the timing of her drinking during different stages of pregnancy can significantly affect the baby's development. FAS symptoms include small heads, certain facial features, low birth weight and brain damage. If undiagnosed and unattended to, these children will often develop serious behavior problems because the brain damage has "short-circuited" certain normal learning capacities.

FAS children have difficulty controlling impulses; they have problems paying attention; they have poor memory and an inability to understand cause and effect. For example, explaining to FAS children that they should not run in front of a truck because they will be hurt could prove futile because their brains may not compute what has been said.

What Tisch also learned in Seattle was that these children cannot learn in a traditional setting, such as readings, lectures or discussions. But they can learn with hands-on activity. To teach a FAS child not to run in front of a truck, a FAS group leader in Seattle takes coffee cans and runs over them with a car. This visual experience is something the FAS child's brain can apparently absorb. In the home environment, these children require structure and routine and not too much stimulation. To learn they need concrete sensory lessons, using as much sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and action as possible. They need constant praise. And they often need medication, but the diagnosis is crucial to prescribing the right medication.

The best chance for these children is medical diagnosis before the age of 6. But, Tisch explains, there are few who can diagnose FAS. In fact, in Santa Clara County there is no one who is diagnosing this syndrome. Tisch and others in the Family Education Foundation are working to educate the professionals in this county. They are bringing information to the medical field to try to find doctors interested in learning to diagnose this problem.

Fetal alcohol effect encompasses the rest of the problems caused by parental alcoholism, everything from environmental influences to brain damage, including learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder. And these children, too, learn better in a structured activity-centered milieu.

"One hour into the training, I realized that most of the kids we had been working with were exhibiting many of the same symptoms as the children the people in Seattle were talking about," Tisch said. The kicker came when she sat through a demonstration role-play that the Washington people use with their FAS children. "I couldn't believe it. It was one of the ones we use. I felt like they'd stolen our role-play." What Tisch realized then was that she already knew how to work with these children.

Last year, Tisch, continuing on the journey that began for her when she founded Kids Are Special, flew back to Seattle, this time to learn more about a program the juvenile courts were implementing. King County had learned that 60 percent to 70 percent of their juvenile offenders had learning disabilities (LD) or attention deficit disorder (ADD) and were not responding to traditional treatment. By setting up a 14-week program of structured activities, including emotional support and role playing, the court had reduced the recidivism rate by 50 percent.

Tisch and Cook, who runs Treatment Options, a residential treatment center for individuals who have come through the court system for crimes committed under the influence of alcohol and drugs, went through the Seattle training. When they brought the program back, they localized it and named it Success Through Awareness and Responsibility Training (START). Cook is the one who has implemented the groups, both at Treatment Options and at Holden Ranch, the Santa Clara County juvenile facility in Morgan Hill.

The results of the START pilot groups are good. While there is usually a major problem with children running away at the ranch, "last year none of the boys in the START groups ran away," Tisch says. This year, just one person from the groups ran away.

Angelo, a 16-year-old gang member living at Holden Ranch, was causing major problems there. The superintendent was threatening to send him back to juvenile hall. Instead, he assigned Angelo to a START group. After about the seventh week, Angelo began to participate. He started doing schoolwork and getting A's. He may be eligible for prerelease from the ranch because of his much-improved behavior.

Tisch and Cook have been working with judges, the probation department and other agencies. In February they will be training members of the mayor's gang task force and others to use the START model at their sites.

Tisch finds it difficult to believe she has been involved in so many successful programs. "I am truly grateful and so surprised to be talking with people like the mayor's assistant and sitting with judges and being called the foremost authority on FAS in this area. Doors keep opening, so I keep on going. I have a passion for this because I know it's making a difference for people who might not have the chance my family had."

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This article appeared in the Saratoga News, December 17, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.