Karen Quincy Loberg / Star staff Maria Rivas, a former meth user, watches her children play. Child Protective Services temporarily removed the girls, Angela, left, Lucy and Ariana from their Ventura home last month.

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As the child of a drug addict, Angela Coronado couldn't trust her mother to show up at school events or take her shopping.

"Our relationship was really nothing," said Angela, 17.

Her mom, Tina Benavente, began smoking methamphetamine heavily in the beginning of the decade and by 2002 was drifting on the streets trying desperately to score more of the drug. She took Angela and her two younger brothers to live in a motel room with their grandmother so they wouldn't be homeless with her. "I was so far gone into drug use, that's where most of my check was going," Benavente said.

Now, the single mom with a 10th-grade education is in recovery after spending a year in the Lighthouse Women and Children's Mission in Oxnard. Not only is she working at the shelter, but also the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Port Hueneme in May.

Authorities never removed the children from her custody, but meth stopped her from being a mother, she said.

"The relationship me and my kids could have had years ago, it's only beginning now," said Benavente, 35, who says she turned to drugs after the death of an infant son from meningitis.

"Doing that drug, you just don't care anymore. You don't care about anything at all."

Hundreds if not thousands of children in Ventura County share the same kind of life or worse, as their parents fall under the grip of the cheap stimulant.

An estimated 400 infants are born each year in Ventura County with prenatal exposure to the drug. Many more live in chaotic homes even if their meth-using mothers managed to abstain while pregnant. The drug is fueling abuse and neglect cases, rising foster care costs, and more placements of children with relatives and adoptive families. Of the 186 children social workers referred for court intervention from July 2006 to January of this year, 88 were at risk because of methamphetamine use in the household, according to a survey by the county's Human Services Agency.

'What I judged, I became'

Although neglect is more common than abuse, local prosecutors said they see dozens of cases in which children have sustained serious physical injuries from parents using meth. The drug can change the chemistry of the brain, causing parents to become paranoid, confused, irritated and violent.

Some injuries are life-altering. Last year, an 11-week-old Simi Valley girl was shaken and squeezed so hard by a father coming down from a meth high that she was blinded in one eye, suffered multiple rib fractures and probably has brain damage. The father, who had a previous history of abuse with a girlfriend's child, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

But most cases are less dramatic, involving mothers such as Alma, who asked to have her last name withheld to protect her children's privacy. Alma said she barely saw her three sons while in the grip of methamphetamine. Relatives raised them as she stayed in motels and friends' homes, she said, "getting high and drinking."

She became pregnant again and used meth the entire nine months. Her daughter was born meth-exposed and was placed in foster care while Alma began getting treatment. Her daughter's birth prompted her to turn her life around: She is now clean and learning how to be a good parent, she said.

"Before I started using, I thought, how could you do that to your children," she said. "I will not judge anybody else again. What I judged, I became."

Unsafe homes

Alma, 21, says her daughter is now doing well, but researchers say the long-term impact on meth-exposed children is still unknown. Nor is it easy to distinguish the effects of drug exposure from the overall effects of the troubled backgrounds from which many of these children come, often involving domestic violence, poverty, parental depression and homelessness.

Maria Rivas, 29, and Missael Palma, 24, are both former meth users struggling with a past laced with drugs and arguments bad enough to bring police to the door.

Last month, a judge removed Rivas' three daughters — whom she says were not prenatally exposed — from the couple's two-bedroom apartment in Ventura.

Rivas burst into tears afterward.

"I feel horrible," she said. "I feel like I have failed. I'm hoping for the best but expecting the worst. Having my kids removed is the worst."

The girls have been in foster care since then, but the court returned them to Rivas on Wednesday.

A week after the removal, Rivas and Palma split up as she focused her energy on getting the girls back. Rivas quit her college classes to enter a drug treatment program that also offers help with parenting skills.

Palma said the family first came to the attention of Child Protective Services when he pinched Angela, 3, on the arm a few months ago. When the child care center she attends reported a new bruise on her cheek, social workers took Angela and her older sisters, Ariana, 4, and Lucy, 8.

The girls blamed Palma, although their mother said she had bitten Angela playfully, causing the injury. The judge did not buy that explanation, Rivas said.

Palma, who is the father of two of the girls, blames meth for part of their problems.

"It stays on our record and our lives forever," he said.

Social workers can't remove children simply because the parents have a drug problem, but the addictions can lead to unsafe homes. The deeper the addiction, the more likely that children will be abused or chronically neglected.

"Some of the homes I have gone into have visible cockroaches on the floor, rodent feces, piles of dishes with rotting food on them," said Jennifer Atkinson, a county social worker who investigates complaints. "Sometimes police find drugs within access to the kids or the kids have access to weapons in the home."

Parents crashing after being up on meth for days, a time when they have no tolerance for a whiny 3-year-old, may strike their children. Other youngsters may break bones because of lack of supervision and then receive no medical attention because their parents don't take them to a doctor. They may not have current immunizations or regular physical checkups. Some have never seen a dentist.

Eric Parsons / Star staff Lacie Thacker presents a birthday cake to her cousin Joseph Navarro in front of his mother, Tina Benavente, center, and sister Angela Coronado. Benavente was separated from her children when using meth.

Judge Tari Cody reviews 800 to 1,000 abuse and neglect cases annually in the dependency court in El Rio, where she decides whether the children should be removed from the home. Many parents are poor single mothers involved in abusive relationships, much like the ones they experienced in their own childhoods.

Under state and federal laws, they usually have a year or less to complete court-ordered programs to get the children back. They must attend parenting and anger management classes, undergo drug treatment and often receive mental-health counseling.

Atkinson said 77 percent of all Ventura County children removed from their homes last year were reunited with their parents within 12 months. No separate analysis was available for meth-involved families, but Cody guessed that half of the meth-using parents whose children are removed get them back.

Some cannot seem to stop using meth, often because of mental illness, she said.

"They are told, If you can't stop, you will lose your child' and they can't stop. They can't stop."

Exposed in the womb

Meth is the drug of choice for women, many of them mothers, who enter treatment in Ventura County and California. Almost 45 percent admitted to programs in the state named methamphetamine as the substance they were abusing, more than alcohol, heroin and marijuana combined. In county drug treatment programs for women who are pregnant or have children, as many as 85 percent have used meth. Many of these women become pregnant while on the drug, which is tied to weight loss, heightened sexual desire, lowered inhibitions and increased energy.

Bronwyn Redfern of Newbury Park says she carried two babies while using meth.

Redfern, 30, said she used meth off and on while carrying Jonathan, 3. Her daughter, Olivia, 2, was exposed during the first six months.

Olivia is doing well, but Jonathan is so aggressive that Redfern says she hates to take him outside.

"He has episodes everywhere we go," she said. "I don't even want to go to the grocery store."

Redfern said she turned to meth at 21, when she was grieving the death of her father. She described taking the drug just to get through the day at a time when she was disabled by depression.

She always thought she would quit if she got pregnant but could not, she said.

"It's easy to say something, but when you're in the situation, you make different choices," she said. "I was an emotional wreck my whole pregnancy with him because of the guilt."

She is now receiving treatment through a county program called A New Start for Moms.

The outpatient program blends child care, parenting instruction and treatment; it is exclusively for pregnant women or mothers with substance-abuse problems.

Redfern also is taking part in Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, a program offered through Casa Pacifica, a nonprofit agency near Camarillo.

Both she and the children's father, Oscar Rodriguez, are learning how to forge a stronger relationship with Jonathan through a system developed for children with serious behavior problems. Using play exercises, a social worker guides them through the 20-week program, which is designed to help them bond with their son and then get him to follow directions without physical discipline.

The couple met at Narcotics Anonymous and have been together for six years. Both say that even when they were using, they kept their children fed and clothed, but they believe they can provide a better home environment now that they're sober.

"I'm hoping he's going to have a good future, but it's up to us," Redfern said.

Rodriguez, 30, says the therapy is working with his son. The retail manager has already lost one family to meth.

He had two sons, a job, a house, a boat, a motorcycle and a pastime coaching Little League in the Palm Springs area, he said. But that all changed nine years ago when life began revolving around the drug.

"It took three years from the day I (first) used to ruin everything in my life," said Rodriguez, who has not seen his sons from that relationship for two years.

Long-term effects

The surging use of the drug is coming at a time when scientists don't really know how meth-exposed children will do in life.

A large study launched three years ago is following 415 children in four states, including California, but its final conclusions have not been released.

So far, the children in the study have exhibited no major damage, such as brain lesions or heart defects, said Barry Lester, a prominent researcher in the field. They were, however, slightly underweight and smaller than normal for the number of weeks of pregnancy.

Photos by Karen Quincy Loberg / Star staff Missael Palma walks Lucy from school to the Boys & Girls Club. Palma and Lucy's mother, Maria Rivas, are both former meth users struggling with a past laced with drugs and arguments bad enough to bring police to the door. "It stays on our record and our lives forever," Palma said about the drug use.

Lester says some meth-exposed children have symptoms similar to babies exposed to cocaine: They're jittery, have tremors and tight muscle tone. Doctors and therapists say these youngsters also have trouble paying attention and regulating their behavior.

It's too soon to know if the children in the study, who are now turning 3, will end up with the kind of learning problems that cocaine-exposed babies have shown, said Lester, director of the Brown University Center for the Study of Children at Risk.

"It is very possible that meth, like cocaine, affects areas of the brain that are in a sense not online yet until kids get to school," he said.

By age 7, cocaine-exposed babies showed a slight lag in IQ as well as poor behavior, trouble controlling themselves and hyperactivity.

"Those are the kind of behaviors that lead kids to experiment with drugs in adolescence," Lester said.

Health officials say meth is producing higher costs for taxpayers as well as for families. It is already pumping up demands for services such as physical therapy, occupational therapy and foster care.

School officials say they don't know whether it's pushing up special education enrollment as well. Two categories that might reflect meth exposure present conflicting data: The number of children with learning disabilities is falling, while those being diagnosed with attention deficit disorders is rising.

Breaking the cycle

There are some promising strategies afoot. About 7,000 pregnant mothers in the county's public medical system have been screened for drug and alcohol use, an effort pediatrician Paul Russell hopes to expand to the private sector. The hope is that doctors will be able to persuade more mothers to stop.

For those already affected, a court program catering to mothers of drug-exposed infants has shown high success rates. Two-thirds of those complete the program, freeing the family from court supervision. These moms are allowed to enter residential treatment with their infants, where they receive counseling and parenting education.

"The choice is between this and having the child go into foster care," said Susan Feldman, a social worker assigned to Ventura County's drug court for mothers giving birth to drug-exposed babies. "That's a huge motivation for a lot of women."

Some counties are doing more, officials said.

A model program in Sacramento County provides what amounts to a "personal trainer" for substance-abusing mothers and fathers when a child is removed from the home.

"Ventura does quite a good job on screening and access for pregnant women," said Nancy Young, who testified before the U.S. Senate on the impact of methamphetamine on child-abuse caseloads. "What's different in Sacramento is that both father and mother receive intensive services and priority for treatment."

The available data do not show whether Sacramento County gets better results than Ventura County, where judges, social workers, counselors and public health nurses collaborate to help repair families.

But the director of a program in Sacramento that coordinates treatment for substance-abusing parents says its system has saved millions in foster care costs and more than doubled the rate at which families are reunified.

'It's a nasty, horrible drug'

Those who complete the program re-offend at a rate of just 1 percent to 2 percent, said Sanford Robinson, director of Specialized Treatment and Recovery Services.

He said California needs to do more in both prevention and treatment to protect children. "It's a drug tailor-made to create child abuse," he said. "It causes you to stay up for days at a time; it puts you on edge. It's a nasty, horrible drug."

Across the state, many treatment programs focus on stopping the passage of drug habits from one generation to the next so that families can stay whole. So far, Benavente says her children seem to be avoiding perpetuating her family's long history with drugs.

Her daughter, who says she found her mother's meth pipes when she was still in elementary school, agreed.

"Everyone is getting sober now," Angela Coronado said. "Everything is getting to the way it should be."