Your Teen’s Addiction Isn’t Your Failure
The Truth Parents Need to Hear
As an addiction specialist who has devoted my career to teen addicts, I walk into family sessions at treatment centers with a very different perspective than most professionals. I got sober at age 21 after struggling with alcoholism.
My mother was the town drunk wherever we landed. Mom and Dad were divorced, so she raised my brothers and me while actively drinking. And predictably, we followed in her footsteps becoming drunks ourselves. The silver lining however, was also Mom also was the one who later found and embraced AA, bringing the message of recovery to her kids. She carried the disease to us genetically, and she also carried recovery. I could have blamed her for my alcoholism, but I chose instead to applaud her for giving me the gift of recovery. After all, if addiction is truly a disease, would I blame her for passing along cancer genes?
In 1969 I wrote Hazelden’s Young, Sober, & Free, followed later by Teenage Addicts Can Recover. I have published four research papers on teen recovery outcomes, and I co-authored Sober Coaching Your Teen to help parents support their kids without the crushing weight of guilt. My brother, a research psychologist, and I even designed studies to evaluate what actually works for adolescents in recovery. Having been raised in an alcoholic/additive home amid booze, heroin, speed, cocaine, etc, I wanted to know what did case cause addictive behavior so I might prevent it with my own child.
When I began visiting adolescent treatment centers as a professional advocate for parents’ rights, I already knew the science and the disease model. Yet time after time I watched the same painful scene unfold. Many parents walk into their first family session feeling the same shock I witness(ed) repeatedly. They’ve just spent weeks or months watching their son or daughter struggle with alcohol or drugs. They’ve tried everything, (more rules, more love, more consequences), only to hear the professionals say the real problem is them. “Your child wouldn’t be here if you had raised them right.” The room goes quiet. Guilt settles in. Parents start replaying every mistake, every argument, every time they said “yes” when they should have said “no.”
This blame feels familiar because, for years, many of us were taught that addiction in young people stems mainly from family problems or poor parenting skills. If only we had been stricter, more attentive, or better role models, our kids would not have turned to substances. But research invites us to look deeper and shift our perspective.
Alcoholism and addiction run in many families. In fact, it can be very aggressive. Today most of us are clean and sober. The few who aren’t have already died from the disease or are in the process of destroying themselves.
I didn’t blame my mother for my alcoholism.
If addiction is a disease, something most professionals expound, then how would raising a child “right” stop them from having it? There are some very healthy families with very sick children and very sick families with healthy children. So why do professionals default to parental styles as a cause of addiction? It took me awhile after earning my diploma in drugs and alcohol, before I realized many professionals in the adolescent recovery field use the wrong model. In most, yes most, teenage treatment centers, I see kids using again within 30 days of discharge. I listened to the tortured self-blame of parents in “therapy” groups when one child after the other went back to what they knew best, using with their peers.
Instinctively I knew they were not bad parents causing an epidemic of adolescent addiction and fentanyl deaths, as a myriad of professionals would have society believe. In fact many professionals have said , and still say, “addiction is a family disease” meaning everyone in the family is sick. I did not then, nor now, believe that. Addiction certainly affects everyone in the family, but like juvenile diabetes, it is not the parents giving ice cream to kids but “the missing cells needed to break down carbohydrates” that cause the disease (https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/genetics-diabetes).
Similarly with young alcoholics, it is not the parent’s parenting skills but the messed-up brain chemistry. “Between 50% and 60% of the vulnerability to {alcoholism/addiction} is inherited.” (https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-topics/health-topics-genetics-alcohol-use-disorder). I am not saying that parents can’t help in prevention of drug abuse, but eating too much sugar and having diabetes are just as different as abusing drugs and suffering from addiction. This is an important distinction, often blurred.
Who is responsible for addiction?
I began reading the work of Phyllis and David York, founders of ToughLove. To my amazement, I found that they too felt professionals had it wrong. Phyllis wrote:
“The therapists who assume that kids’ parents are responsible for their teenagers’ behavior are dramatically reducing the chances that the kids will change for the better. Why should they bother to change when the therapist has excused them and blamed their parents? Let Mom and Dad change. It’s their fault.” ~ *ToughLove Solutions*, p. 24
At this point I decided parents needed an advocate in the field of addiction recovery. My brother, Dr. Michael Marshall (professor emeritus at West Liberty University) and I designed several studies to assess recovery and treatment for teens.
We found some interesting results that were published in 4 peer-reviewed journals:
1. Young people treated with adults in adult centers had a recovery rate equal to the adults whereas young people treated in teen centers generally used more drugs coming out of treatment.
2. Professionals from teen treatment centers gave less stringent recovery plans to young addicts than older addicts and professionals in multi-generational centers tended to prescribe similar plans to both groups.
3. Young people with parents in recovery or other self-help groups were more likely to respond to treatment than those with parents who were not in community support groups.
So my advice to parents with addicted kids: Put them in a center that treats adults and young people in the same center (if you have a choice) and consider learning to sober-coach them.
You are not responsible for the bad choices of your young person, but you can help them make better choices given the right training. (Without the right training you become an enabler and often make the problem worse.)
You are not responsible for the brain chemistry of your addicted child (although allowing them to use at a young age increases at-risk children for addiction).
You are responsible to seek help for children in trouble with mind-altering chemicals. Just like you would be responsible to get help for them if they had juvenile diabetes. But if the health care professional you choose doesn’t recognize the difference between abuse and addiction or excludes the disease merely on the basis of a young age, find another health care professional.
If the health care professional you chose tells you that you are the cause of your son’s or daughter’s choices and/or their disease, find another health care professional.
Why? Because if addiction is a disease, then it may strike anyone at anytime. Addiction isn’t “infectious” and your kids won’t “catch” it from you (although your DNA may have contributed).
Addiction is a functional disease (see the graph) that means a part of the body doesn’t function properly and causes dis-ease, such as heart disease or COPD.
So does this mean you can’t help them? Not at all. There are many things a parent can do to help their addicted child, but taking the blame isn’t one of them.
So let’s retire the blame game for good: find the right health-care professional, learn the science of this inherited brain disease, and step into your real power, as the sober coach and advocate your teen actually needs.