Often parents want tips on what to do when their child is struggling with substance use.
I wish there was an easy answer. Unfortunately, this is a complicated problem, not one that can be solved with a few words.
I’ve interviewed many people over the years. There was one question that was always on the top of my mind and most likely yours.
I decided to round up some great pieces of advice and put them together in today’s article for you!
I’ve included the question before each response as it was varied in each of the interviews.
Basically the question was this: “What advice do you have for parents who are concerned about their young adult or teen’s substance use?”
This article is extra long, but it is worth the time.
Read the answers to find what advice makes sense for you.
David Sheff
What words of hope do you have for parents who are struggling with their child’s addiction?
Research says that most likely your child is going to be OK. In the middle of it, you don’t believe it, but it’s true. Of course, there are no guarantees, so we have to take this seriously for what it is, which is life-threatening. Most young people who become addicted are OK. That is the first thing to know.
The second thing to know is that it is so stressful and you can crumble around this. Parents get divorced, families explode, so we need to get help by going to therapy or going to Al-Anon meetings or whatever it is. The hopeful part about that is when you do have that help, you will feel better. It still doesn’t make this easy. Nothing makes this easy, but you can make better decisions. You can suffer a lot less.
There is also hope that as this field progresses, we are going to be able to learn about why people use and how to stop them from using in the first place, why drug use escalates and how we can stop it before it gets to be a serious addiction. When it does escalate, what addiction is and how we can better treat it.
Dr. Adi Jaffe
With all the conflicting advice out there around addiction, how should parents change their view to better help their addicted child?
First of all, I would urge all parents to examine “why” their child is turning to the drugs/alcohol/etc. We place far too much emphasis on the behavior and not enough on the underlying reason.
This means that, by forcing your child to stop the problematic behavior, you are actually telling them that you don’t care about what they were trying to achieve.
For instance, if your child has started smoking marijuana because all of their friends do, by requiring them to stop you are telling them that you don’t care whether they fit in with their friends… Or at least this is what THEY interpret or perceive. THIS is the reason for so much resistance around addiction and recovery. Without addressing the “why” you cannot truly resolve the problem and you will build resistance.
Now, to be clear, addressing the “why” is definitely NOT always easy or simple. However, identifying it and explicitly making it part of the discussion will at least create a more realistic and potentially successful approach.
Imagine, in the above scenario, talking to your child about how you recognize that all of their friends smoke and that it’s hard to stick out… It begins an entirely different way of communicating about these issues.
Mary Cook
What advice do you have for parents of drug addicts/alcoholics who are just coming to terms with the diagnosis or suspicion of their son or daughter’s substance abuse?
Be a positive example of what you hope for your loved ones. Seek education, support, personal examination and growth for yourself, and strengthen your spiritual practices. Identify the assets and liabilities of your kids.
Spend some positive, quality time with them and listen, to understand them better. Provide positive bonding and enriching opportunities, and set reasonable boundaries, supervision and firm consequences for them. Learn about and make use of accurate drug testing methods. Research treatment options and make this a part of the consequences of addictive behavior.
If addictions or compulsions run in the family, educate yourself and them about this.
Dr. Robert Meyers
What are your top three messages for parents just learning about CRAFT who want to communicate better with their child?
The number one thing is that you’re not alone. You’re among millions of other parents in dozens of other countries that are having the same kind of problem. You’re not alone. We want to normalize the fact that some teenagers have problems.
One of the reasons they have problems is their frontal cortex, the part of their brain that makes decisions, is not fully developed in adolescence. Give them a little bit more space. You’re not alone. Get the treatment and you will find lots and lots of people who’re in the same boat that you’re in.
The second thing is this is something that has been around from the beginning of time, and “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” If you’re going to be mean to your kid, yelling at them, and too structured for a teenager or young person, it’s going to be more difficult to get them to hang out with you, spend time with you, or even have a conversation with you.
I think the big thing is let’s talk positively. Catch your loved one doing something positive instead of catching them always doing something negative.
Let’s look at the positive stuff. You also have as much time and as many chances as you want to get into treatment and to get help.
Go back and find out a different way to do things. Talk to other women or other people that have been through the program and you can help one another.
And the bottom line, the last thing is that I want people to help themselves first. Listen: you’re fried, you’re depressed, you’re anxious, and you should be. You’re angry; you should be. Things aren’t going well and all of a sudden this adolescent turns into this kind of monster.
Don’t isolate yourself. Stay in contact with friends and family. Get your life back. Get your power back so you’re more capable of handling a child who is having some difficulties. You’ll be stronger. You’ll feel better about yourself. Your self-esteem will go up. Your ability to handle difficult situations in a positive way is more likely to happen.
Scott Stevens
What are three tips for parents who are concerned about their adolescent or young adult’s drinking?
I think it’s really important to pick your opportunity to speak with them. If they are under the influence and while it may be hard to watch, maybe upsetting, make sure they are safe, but don’t address them head-on with the problem right then and there when they are under the influence.
We all have moments of lucidity at some point in our using careers regardless of the drug of choice that we have. The opportunity to speak to the addict or the alcoholic is not when they are under the influence, but when they are out from under it.
The first thing is timing and the second thing is compassion. You’re not accusing the person, you are not confronting the person. You are talking with the person showing care and concern over very serious health and lifestyle issue that if it is not addressed, it will kill you.
This is not a “He’ll grow out of it phase.” This is an end game here, regardless of the type of chemical that you are talking about with substance abuse. Show some compassion rather than confrontation.
Be informative, factual, rather than getting into the “You know better.” or “This is bad thinking.” Get away from that for a moment and focus on the facts. This is a serious illness and this is what the chemicals will do and what they are doing to your body.
In the case of alcoholics, it’s shaving 18 years off your life expectancy. It’s causing more than 60 other different diseases. Having a more factual approach is going to take some of the emotion out of an emotionally charged situation. I know for my family, it was very emotional for them to stand back and watch as a career and a marriage disintegrate all because I could not put down the bottle, or chose not to get help for this.
But when the dialogue changed from being accusatory and emotionally loaded to something that was more factual, it started to get through to me and that is an important part of the conversation that parents need to have. Keep it on the facts, rather than on the emotions.
Barbara Stoefen
What are three suggestions for families who are just realizing that their child is using substances?
The first thing I always tell parents is “it’s not your fault.” Thinking we somehow failed our child, or that we may be the cause of their substance use or addiction, will keep us stuck and cause needless pain. There is nothing we did or didn’t do, to cause our child’s addiction. It is no one’s fault.
Reach out and get support. It is critical that we take care of ourselves, and we can’t do this alone. 12-Step groups like Al-Anon, Nar-Anon and Codependents Anonymous can be of great help. We need to learn to set boundaries, and where our responsibilities begin and end.
A SMART Recovery program can help, and connecting with other parents that are experiencing what we are can make us feel less alone. Private counseling can also be instrumental. We often “can’t see the forest but for the trees” and an experienced therapist can help give us perspective.
Become educated. Learn absolutely everything you can about the science of addiction, the impact on the brain, and the reasons why people use drugs in spite of negative consequences. The more we understand the nature of addiction, the better we’ll be able to advocate for our child. With understanding also comes the ability to forgive some of the wreckage that invariably comes with a child’s compulsive drug use.
TJ Woodward
If a parent walked up to ask for your advice to help their child and you only had a few minutes to give them your best tip, what would it be?
What happens so often is what’s driving the addictive behavior is the disconnection, the trauma, and the shame. What we know about shame is that it thrives in silence and secrecy. A lot of times parents may not want to re-experience those feelings themselves. There’s an idea, well, you know, she seems better.
He seems like he’s worked through it. Why would I bring it up? Why would I re-traumatize? The first thing is a safe container, a place for your child to be authentic. If it’s a counselor or a support group, ultimately, we work with shame by creating a safe space to begin to talk about what the person with an addiction is experiencing.
Sometimes it’s about recognizing that as a parent, you’re not the person that will be able to reach your young person at this point.
Bring in support. Bring in a counselor that the young person can trust. In my own life, when I was in my addiction from age 13 to 20, I wasn’t very open to talking with my parents.
I did have some people in my life that I trusted. I was able to open up to them. One helpful tip would be to bring in some support for the young person. Bring in someone they can relate to. The key here is for them to have a safe place to open up and be able to process what’s happened.
Pat Aussem
What advice do you have for parents who are struggling with their child’s substance abuse?
A couple of things. One is doing your homework on what your child is using, what the signs of use are, what the side effects are, and things like that so you know what this particular drug is doing to affect your child. That is really important.
It is interesting to me that in many cases for parents, if their child had a cancer diagnosis, they would be learning everything there is to know about cancer, but with substance misuse, often there is a sort of apathy or a lack of really digging in and learning about what this does to the brain. What is it doing to their body on a physical level and on an emotional level?
Understand why your child is using drugs or alcohol. and get a sense of why it is important to them. Intervene early and as often as you can because in many cases, it is so much easier for someone to build a life where they have friends, a job, they are in school, or they have their house rather than waiting for all of that to dissipate and then saying, “We are just going to start from scratch.”
It is important to look for ways to engage your child in activities that will compete with their drug use.
Also, getting help from people with addiction credentials is important. I know in my early attempts at trying to help my son I didn’t realize that substance use was part of the picture, so when we turned to therapists and psychiatrists, I wasn’t looking for someone with an addictions background. I now know that this is critical.
If they are using opiates, definitely get overdose prevention training. Also, I would suggest learning about medication-assisted treatment like the use of Vivitrol, which is a once-monthly injection; and Suboxone; which you can take on a daily basis to help with cravings and to help with preventing overdoses.
The last thing I would say is to really work on your own self-care and social supports as well as finding support groups like yours because I think you learn so much from your peers who are struggling with this as well. You can get a lot of useful information and feel like you are not alone in this.
Dr. Herby Bell
What tips do you have for parents when they find out their child is experimenting, dependent or have crossed that line to addiction?
Get in touch with their own intuition. The answers are inside if we have a process to be introspective. Let’s take a look at how we are taking a look at our lives, and start the education process very early on. This is an intergenerational, family legacy, multi-factorial problem including a genetic predisposition. It requires a holistic, integrated approach.
Education, education, education.
Open up the conversation. Let’s get addiction out of the closet and turn over every stone we possibly can because there are different strokes for different folks.
Dean Dauphinais
What would be three pieces of advice you would give parents who are now struggling with their child’s substance use?
It’s tough to limit it to three things.
1. Don’t feel guilty or ashamed. Addiction affects millions of people in this country. It doesn’t care where you live, how much money you have, what color your skin is, what your level of education is, what you’re occupation is, etc. While it might be a natural first reaction to feeling guilty or ashamed, the quicker you can move past that and realize that you are not alone, the better off you’ll be.
2. Stay calm. This is something that will likely take some practice for most people (myself included). No matter how much anger you feel toward your loved one and their substance abuse problem, losing your cool and yelling at them will not make anything better. In fact, it’s likely to make things worse. Believe me; I was anything but calm early on in my son’s addiction. I have since learned that cooler heads definitely prevail.
3. Work on your own recovery. So many parents and loved ones of people afflicted with addiction don’t realize that their own recovery is just as important as their child’s. In fact, it might be more important. If you are a physical/emotional wreck, you will be unable to help your loved one in any positive way. Instead of one healthy person being available to help one sick person, there ends up being two sick people, neither of whom can help the other. To paraphrase David Sheff, don’t become addicted to your loved one’s addiction.
Denise Mariano
What advice do you have for parents who are struggling with their child’s substance use issue?
First and foremost, to never give up hope. A favorite quote of mine from David Sheff:
“Don’t give up hope on someone you love — there is always hope. There is always hope for someone until there isn’t. While there is hope, it’s our job to do anything we can do to get somebody we love into treatment.”
It is imperative that parents know that today, there are options in helping and supporting your loved ones struggling with addiction. The advice given too often is that we can’t help our children. We are told that tough love is the only way and we must let them hit their bottom.
This black and white, cookie-cutter approach must change. Each child together with their family brings a different dynamic. Each family is unique. Too many, including parents, are giving the advice to kick loved ones out of the house, to detach, to let them hit bottom.
Tough love can work for some, however, we must respect all paths to recovery and I think we must be careful to give advice. Tough love was not an option for our family. This was not an approach we would have taken if our child was sick with another medical disease.
That being said, I will never give advice based on what worked for our family but rather share what worked for us.
Rand Teed
What advice do you have for parents of drug addicts/alcoholics who are just coming to terms with the diagnosis or suspicion of their son or daughter’s substance abuse?
1. Parents: Don’t yell. Kids with drug and alcohol issues don’t have hearing problems. Educate yourself. Get a professional involved, and join a support group. This is not something to be ashamed of.
2. Individuals: Continuing to use drugs and alcohol will make things worse. Substance abuse is a primary problem, which means you can’t really fix anything else till you fix it.
OVER TO YOU. What tips have you received that have been helpful?
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