Santa Barbara County is home to nearly 450,000 Californians, 60,000 of whom are living at or below the federal poverty level. An estimated 28 percent of those living in poverty are children, according to the county’s yet-to-be-released 2017 Children’s Scorecard.
Economic hardship is just one of the many common factors that can put families and children under stress, according to Barbara Finch, Children and Adult Network director with the Santa Barbara County Department of Social Services.
Finch, who presented some of the key topics included in the 2017 Children’s Scorecard at the South Coast Youth Safety and Wellness Summit in Santa Barbara on July 16, said constant stress without remediation can be especially harmful to children.
“So many of the problems that we have are rooted in this toxic stress,” Finch told the Sun, adding that when children constantly produce stress hormones it actually changes the architecture of their brains. “When the architecture of the brain is changed, then that is what makes it difficult to learn, and it makes it difficult to be present, and it makes it difficult to control impulses.”
Those challenges can lead to behavioral and mental health issues, Finch said, which are often left untreated or misdiagnosed and can worsen with age.
But Finch and other county officials are hoping to make “trauma-informed care” the norm on the Central Coast.
Trauma, she said, can stem from any life event—poverty, natural disasters, health issues, abuse—and adversely impacts individuals in all socioeconomic levels.
“So I think our community has become a lot more aware of trauma because of the disasters in South County, the violence that’s happening in North County, and there has been a lot of awareness about community and how communities are impacted by these kinds of traumatic events,” Finch said. “So if we understand the impacts that has on people, including children, then we can shift how we’re doing things to better meet the needs of those kids.”
Children under 17 who experience four or more traumatic or stressful events, also called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), are more likely to have lower educational attainment and earnings as adults, and to experience unemployment or incarceration, according to the 2017 Children’s Scorecard.
And a retrospective study of Santa Barbara County adults released in 2014 showed that about 57 percent had experienced at least one ACE while growing up, and more than 13 percent had four or more ACEs, according to the Children’s Scorecard.
The scorecard, which the KIDS Network of Santa Barbara County plans to officially release and present to the Board of Supervisors within a few weeks, is the first report of its kind on the well-being of local children since the last scorecard was published in 2010. Finch said the scorecard, which brings together youth-related data and narratives from various county departments, is really the first step in becoming a trauma-informed community.
With all the county’s youth and family-related data laid out in one cohesive report, Finch said county officials of every sector will be able to pinpoint which stress factors are most deeply impacting locals, and then find better ways to help.
One of those common denominators, she said, is poverty. Most of the county’s economic base is driven by low-paying jobs in the agriculture and hospitality industries, Finch said. That, paired with the area’s high cost of housing, has given Santa Barbara County the highest child poverty rate in the state.
And although Finch said many families living in poverty are doing perfectly well raising children, economic hardship often puts added stress on families; parents are often working multiple jobs and have little time to attend to their children, nutritious food can be scarce, and housing is crowded.
Those issues are all too familiar to Cristal Robles, a sophomore at Allan Hancock College and intern at the Community Action Commission of Santa Barbara County, a private nonprofit that hosted the South Coast Youth Safety and Wellness Summit on July 16 through its South Coast Task Force on Youth Safety.
At the summit, which addressed various topics concerning youth safety, Robles and several other local kids discussed issues they face and possible solutions they’d like to see implemented throughout the county.
Robles said a lot of kids like her, who are living in low-income households, grow up fast. She and her siblings would go to work with their parents every summer in an attempt to help out financially, Robles said, and her sister, older by only three years, essentially raised her.
“She’s like a second mother to me,” Robles told the Sun.
Robles, now 21, is doing the same for her two younger brothers and her sister’s three young kids, who she said are all under the age of 12.
It can be difficult attending college and working while also caring for five children, Robles said, and she often has to leave class or work early to pick the kids up from school. Summer is worse—child care is totally unaffordable, and many of the area’s summer sports programs are too.
“It’s tough to manage all the things,” Robles said, adding that she sometimes thinks about everything her older sister had to do to raise her at a younger age. “At the moment it didn’t feel like anything, but looking back, and having to experience what she experienced, she basically gave up her childhood.”
Aside from raising siblings, Robles said many local kids act as English translators for their foreign parents and are constantly asked to help parents navigate complex governmental and education systems in the U.S. And Robles said her house, like many of her peers’ houses, is overcrowded, and finding a quiet place to study has always been a challenge.
But all these adverse experiences have inspired Robles to help. She said she one day hopes to start a nonprofit for youth, one that would give them a quiet place to study at all hours of the day and night, provide job and internship opportunities, counseling, and affordable or free extra curricular activities.
Robles said she hopes the county provides similar services.
“Regarding the summit, it was nice to have a presence of youth voice there because so many times youth are denied that,” Robles said. “So having them want to listen to the voice of the youth is very empowering because these are things that affect us. I encourage the county to listen to these stories but also to effect change.”
Staff Writer Kasey Bubnash can be reached at kbubnash@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 2, 2018.
