It's About the Children

When dealing with clients who have children there are no easy answers. The situation came up for us last weekend when a couple, graduates of our program, were asked to submit a urine sample. The husband had no problem submitting a clean test. But the wife had a myriad of excuses why she couldn't give a sample.

"I have to be to work in half an hour."

"I don't have time right now. I'll be busy for the next few days, but I can give you a test Thursday."

She went on and on with reasons why she couldn't get to the office. When our manager offered to go to our sober living apartments to collect the sample, she had an excuse why that wouldn't work either. However, the bottom line at TLC is when anyone refuses to give a sample we assume they're dirty. It's an admission they're dirty – regardless of the circumstances.

In this situation, though, the dilemma is that this couple has children. And one of the reasons they came to our program was to get clean and sober so they could regain custody of them from child protective services. Child protective services expects a period of sobriety before they'll return children of drug using parents. One thing they accept as evidence of sobriety is when the parents pass multiple surprise drug tests.

Part of our agreement in this case is to monitor their sobriety and report the results to their case worker, which we regularly do.

In this situation, we'll meet with the parents on Monday and discuss with them how to resolve the situation. One question we'll ask of the parent who refused the drug test is how serious she is about having her children returned. She can't have it both ways. She has to decide if she wants to get clean and sober. If she decides that she wants to work toward her initial goal of getting her children back we'll return her to a higher level of supervision in our primary program. If she is unwilling to do that, then we'll have to discharge her. We have no control over what CPS does about these children. But our responsibility is to do our part in reporting the results of the drug tests - whatever they are.

The ultimate goal is for the children to be raised by drug free parents. We'll do our part toward achieving that goal.