Rehab Riviera: Addiction takes up residence on Sesame Street

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Move over, Elmo; Karli has arrived on Sesame Street, and her mom is struggling with addiction.

In another bold stroke for the beloved children’s show, the nonprofit Sesame Workshop launched Karli‘s complicated story online in October. The fuzzy green monster, age 6 1/2, is in foster care as her mother works toward recovery, and wrestles with her own powerful feelings of isolation, fear, shame and guilt, much like the 5.7 million children under age 11 who live with parents struggling with substance abuse disorder.

With the loving support of Elmo, other Muppets and a few humans, Karli learns that she’s not alone, that she’ll be cared for, and that addiction is a sickness where people need help to get better.

But perhaps the most important message she hears lifts the heaviest weight from her small monster shoulders is that mom’s woes aren’t her fault.

Jerry Moe is, in a way, one of Karli’s creators.

Moe is national director of Hazelden Betty Ford Children’s Program, and an advisory board member for the National Association for Children of Alcoholics. Last year, while in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, Moe got an unexpected text: “The people at Sesame Street want to talk to you.”

Moe — who spoke this month in Anaheim, at the California Community Opioid Crisis — had one thought: “Who’s scamming me?”

Nobody, it turned out. Moe has an expertise that Sesame Street wanted to tap. The author of “Through a Child’s Eyes: Understanding Addiction and Recovery” also is the creator of created the Seven C’s, a healing program for children:

“I didn’t cause addiction. I can’t control addiction. I can’t cure addiction. But I can help take care of myself, by communicating feelings, making healthy choices and celebrating me.”

It’s a mantra for children, like Karli, whose parents are controlled by addiction. And the work clearly struck a chord with the creatives at Sesame Street. Karli’s story incorporates much of Moe’s work.

While some have criticized Sesame Street’s effort, saying the show’s viewers — typically ages 3 to 5 — are too young to be exposed to the life and death theme of addiction, Moe believes those kids need the support.

Once, he was one of them.

“One of every three or four kids out there is growing up loving someone who has addiction,” Moe said. “When you think about opioid or meth or alcohol addiction, you don’t think about kids. But children are the first hurt and last helped. It’s a population we don’t give enough attention.”

Soon after the call, Moe became an adviser to Sesame Street. It’s something he calls “bucket-list stuff for me.”

“We really got to guide the process, sit with them and talk about what language to use,” Moe said.

The overall vibe, he added, was thrilling.

“Being on the set of Sesame Street, hanging out with Elmo, trying to be this mature adult who’s a children’s counselor, (was) an unbelievable feeling. Chills.”

Throwing rocks

At the famous Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Moe runs four-day workshops for kids caught in addiction’s web. It’s open to all kids, he said; they don’t need to have a parent in treatment to attend. And Mrs. Ford set up financial accounts to ensure that no child would be turned away for lack of funds.

They start by playing — tossing a koosh ball on a string, colorfully decorating folders, sticking pins in a map of the United States as a fun way to see how far some of the kids have traveled to be there. Then they talk.

Everyone there has been hurt by a loved one’s drinking and drug use.

Counselors try to help the kids separate the people they love from the disease that consumes them. To do that, they use metaphors that kids can understand: People, even parents, can get hooked like a fish and can’t get away. And being hooked is like getting gum stuck in their hair; now they need help to get it out.

There’s a backpack filled with 41 pounds of small rocks, each painted with a word: “Hurt.” “Guilt.” “Shame.” “Fighting.” “Abuse.” The kids urged to try to lift the backpack to feel its heft. Their parents, the kids are told, are carrying this. Some start drinking and using drugs because they don’t know how to get rid of it. And at first, the drinking or the drugs puts the bag to sleep. But when that feeling wears off, the grownup has to pick up the bag again — only now it weighs more.

The kids are encouraged to talk about how it can hurt to have an addicted parent — the broken promises, fighting, chaos, disappointment.

“Because of the chaos and uncertainty you’ve been living through, you’ve got your own bag of rocks,” they’re told. They’re asked to take the rocks out of their bags, releasing the sadness, anger and fear they’ve been carrying.

The older kids also are warned that addiction runs in families, and the only way to be certain they won’t get trapped is to never smoke, drink, or use drugs.

Parents and grandparents participate the last two days. The kids can say “I love you… I don’t want you to die.”

The program gets referrals from the child welfare system, from the courts, from other treatment programs. Anyone interested can call 760-773-4291 for more information.

Moe puts it simply: “The only difference between the kids and their parents or grandparents is that those adults are yesterday’s kids that nobody helped.”

California reboot

Officials from Hazelden Betty Ford have been pushing California to tighten up its notoriously lax regulation of the addiction treatment industry, where success — and failure — trickles down to kids.

A year ago, in a five-part series of news stories, the Southern California News Group probed the links between addiction and the child welfare system. It found that while California social service agencies see addiction as a contributing factor to just 12 percent of the state’s child welfare cases, the reality is that addiction is key to as much as 80 percent of those cases, according to several studies and child welfare experts.

Moe was hired by the state of South Carolina as a consultant more than 20 years ago. They worked with a Madison Avenue advertising firm that created the public campaign, “Alcohol abuse. Drug abuse. Child abuse. One thing often leads to another.” California, Moe suggested, might do well to follow that example.

“Just as social welfare needs to ask that question — “Is there an issue of substance use disorder in the family?” — we always have to ask the question, ‘What about child maltreatment?’ We know those two things go together,” he said.

The Sesame Street initiative on this topic is an enormous leap forward, he said. In addition to Karli, it includes articles on how can professionals help these children, how parents can start rebuilding trust, as well as storybooks and interactive coloring.

But right now, Karli’s story unfolds on the online version of “Sesame Street,” not on the TV program piped into millions of homes.

“My hope is that, somewhere down the line, the character can be on the air,” Moe said. “That has been a dream of mine from the beginning.”

But as everyone involved with addiction well knows, it’s one step at a time.