Family and Drug Abuse

Family and Drug Abuse

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Family and Drug Abuse

INTRODUCTION

Family is a social institution and involves a kinship group consisting of two or more individuals who consider themselves related by blood, marriage, and adoption. Based on this, a family can be considered to be a group of persons that are directly related by kin connections, with the adult members of the kinship members adopting the responsibility of caring for the children. Family members live together in the same home and interact with each other in their separate social roles, usually those of parents, spouses, siblings, and children. It’s critical to differentiate between a household and a family since a household may include roomers or borders sharing a common residence. Also, a family should be distinguished from a kindred since although a kindred concerns bloodlines, it may be divided into several households. In most cases, a family is not differentiated from the marriage pair. However, the central element of a family group is the relationship between parents and children, which may sometimes be absent in marriage pairs. Therefore, a family is made up of an adult and their children. In most cases, a family is made up of two adults who are married to each other, generally a man and a woman (often of different ancestries and not related by blood), and their children. There are two main types of families: extended and nuclear families. An extended family may comprise not just the parents and their unmarried children who live at home but also their married children, their spouses, their children’s descendants, and maybe elderly relatives. On the other hand, a nuclear family comprises a mother, a father, and their children. All social stratification models regard the nuclear family as a solidary unit whose members share roughly the same social class rank. A nuclear family is thought to be the oldest and most often used type of family. Most people believe that the husband’s occupation is the best (or only) index of a family’s social status. Working wives are often overlooked as potential contributors to the same. The social stratification in a family tends to affect parental values due to the impact of the parents’ occupational self-direction on their values.

There is a wide range of alcohol and drug use behaviors that may be classified as substance involvement, ranging from the occasional use of these substances to the development of physiological dependency and the subsequent impairment of daily living function. Drug and substance abuse is a major social issue in the family, as children born of parents involved in drug and substance abuse often end up drug addicts. Children have a chance to make their own choices on drugs and substances; however, although children and parents may have different values, the predominant effect tends to come from the parents, greatly affecting the values that children exhibit. Supporting this statement, Solis et al. (2012) urge that one of the clearest and most significant risks shown by children whose parents abuse drugs is children’s a drug and substance use in adulthood. According to the author, 53% of children whose parents engage in alcohol and substance use compared to 25% of their counterparts have alcohol or drug use disorders by the time they reach adulthood. Also, heritability accounts for roughly 50-60% risk of developing drug and substance use behaviors, which indicates that family transmission of alcohol and drug use disorders is in part due to a significant genetic component. Drug and substance abuse has a negative impact on a child’s upbringing, especially when the parent’s substance use tends to interfere with their ability to raise their children and provide a safe, nurturing environment. According to statistics, 1 in 5 children grows up in a family where a parent or both abuses drugs or alcohol (Raitasalo et al., 2019). Most parents fall into drug and substance abuse due to depression and stress in which they use drugs to escape reality. At first, they are able to control it, but later, they develop addiction problems. Most children grow up witnessing their parents struggling at a young age, leading them to develop trauma that has long-term implications for the child. Thus, these youngsters are a three-time bound to be disregarded or genuinely and physically mishandled. These children are twice more likely to have an alcohol and drug abuse problem compared to their peers whose parents have no drug addiction problems. Family relations and their influence on children’s substance use can also be viewed in terms of family members’ connectedness. Since the family remains the main source of socialization, attachment, and nurturing for humans in today’s society, the change is likely to affect the entire family system when a parent starts to change their behaviors. Therefore, it is evident that the family institution plays a major role in influencing children to engage in drug and substance abuse. This study explores how drug abuse between parents influences a child’s upbringing.

LITERATURE REVIEW

According to Primary socialization theory, young people’s major socialization sources are their families, and thorough assessments of therapies suggest that some family-based models may be beneficial. There are several ways in which the family may help to prevent and intervene with drug abuse. Children are less likely to engage in drug abuse if they have a strong relationship with their parents. As a family risk factor, social learning processes play an important role in modeling and encouraging drug use and giving access to substances (Lee et al., 2017). Researchers have led a great deal of examination in the endeavor to explore the effect of poor nurturing to impacting youngsters into becoming medication and substance addicts. Shek et al. (2020) conducted research on the influence of family factors on substance abuse in early adolescents and found that the mother-adolescent relationship was a high predictor of adolescent substance abuse. A similar study conducted by Becona et al. (2012) on the impact of parental styles and drug use found that authoritative parenting has a protective role against substance abuse while the neglectful style has a high risk of drug and substance abuse among children. Shakya et al. (2012) observed that youngsters with definitive moms are less likely to toast a mark of tipsiness, are more averse to hit the bottle hard, less inclined to smoke cigarettes, and less inclined to utilize cannabis than kids from careless families. Despite these research results, very few studies explore how families with drug and substance-addictive parents influence their children to become addicts. Supporting this statement, Schuler et al. (2019) urge that the degree to which associations between peer and family substance and drug use and adolescents substance use has not been fully examined. Thus, there is a need for more research to determine the correlation between addicted parents to drugs and substances and children who take drugs.

Schuler et al. (2019) further reveal that the limited number of existing studies that examine the relationship between parents’ alcohol and substance use and adolescents’ substance abuse have yielded inconclusive and inconsistent findings. On the same note, Latvala et al. (2022) urge that genetically informed research has yielded varied conclusions as to what degree parental drug usage contributes to child substance misuse and antisocial behavior owing to similar environmental and genetic variables. As such, there is a need to further investigate whether drug use between parents influences their children’s substance use. This study fills this research gap. On a different note, Rusby et al. (2018) established claimed that comprehending the predictors of early initiation of drugs and substance use among adolescents may inform efforts to prevent substance use and its related problems. Since drugs and substance use among teenagers is an increasing issue of concern in the contemporary world, this study aims to uncover how drug abuse between parents influences the upbringing of a child and the child’s engagement in drug and substance use. The study’s findings will inform the efforts to prevent substance use among teenagers.

METHOD

A literature-based approach will be utilized in this investigation. Research has shown that a researcher may use the knowledge they currently have and the knowledge they don’t have to support their claims (Newman & Gough, 2020). A complete systematic review and meta-analysis will be performed by the researcher to determine how drug abuse between parents influences a child’s upbringing. A systematic literature review is a research strategy, and procedure used to locate and critically evaluate relevant research and collect data from current research. Conversely, in a meta-analysis, data from many research are combined to compare and highlight any inconsistencies, trends, or connections that appear when several studies on the same subject are examined in different contexts. Journals on the topic regarding family and drug and substance abuse. Also, the research will look at case studies on how parental bringing influences a child. Having obtained the necessary data, a careful review of the data will be done to determine the relevance and credibility of the researchers. Then a comparison of the data from various sources will be carried out to determine the consistency of their findings. By doing this, I will have come to a conclusion as to whether children involved in drug and substance abuse are influenced by their addictive parents. An overview of the search strategy and selection criteria utilized to select the studies for review is provided below.

Search Strategy and Selection Criteria

To find the most relevant publications, the researcher will use a variety of reliable databases, including ProQuest, Science Direct, Scholar, EbscoHost, and Sage. The following search phrases will be utilized to locate relevant articles: “impacts of parents’ drugs use on children’s substance use,” “Parent’s substance use and children’s drugs use,” “the consequences of parent’s drugs and substance use of their children.” Boolean operators such as OR, Not, or AND will also be used in conjunction with truncation and wildcard techniques to limit the results. In addition, an ancestry search was used to track out potential inclusions. This will include keeping track of and incorporating in the evaluation of any relevant footnote references and referenced references. The researcher will devise a set of exclusion and inclusion criteria to find the most relevant and reputable sources of information for the review. These criteria will be applied in order to ensure that the sources included in the research are accessible, relevant, and reputable. The next paragraphs go through the criteria for inclusion and exclusion.

Based on the inclusion criteria, the review will comprise research that looks at the effects of drug abuse between parents on the upbringing of their child and their child’s drugs and substance intake. The study will include articles published in the past five years to ensure up-to-date information is used to address the research questions. Additionally, for the sake of this evaluation, only items written in English were considered. Peer-reviewed journal articles, academic papers, books, and dissertations will also be included in the review. Those papers in which the entire text will not be made available online were solely considered for inclusion in the review. Also, only articles with free access will be reviewed.

Based on the exclusion criterion, newspapers, periodicals, podcasts, and other online publications will be excluded. Also, any studies presenting conclusions in letters or abstracts to the editor will be excluded since they do not provide complete information. In addition, research that will not be published in English or that will not have open access will be excluded. Because they do not offer the researcher complete information, book reviews and summaries will also be omitted from the study. Studies that will not include any of the search phrases in the topic or abstract will also be omitted.

All relevant and reliable papers will be collected for examination after preliminary screening of the research is completed. The researcher will then create a data extraction sheet that will include information on the study’s publication date, sample size, geographic area, and design, as well as the study’s findings. The risk of bias will be examined by concentrating on the methodological concerns, such as whether the research design was adequate and if a sufficient number of participants were selected for each study.

IMPLICATIONS

The research on family and drug and substance abuse is important since it will help inform the role of addictive parents to children abusing drugs and substances. Children look up to their parents in regards to behavioral values. The parents are the role model of the child, and thus, if they have a poor upbringing, they might end up having a negative impact on their lives, including engaging in drugs and substance abuse, among other moral issues such as bullying and stereotyping. Drug and substance abuse is a major social issue in the United States as it is a public health issue. According to research, more than 21 million Americans aged 12 and above have at least one addiction. The drug overdose problem in the United States has more than tripled since 1990 (van Amsterdam, Pierce & van den Brink, 2021). The family has been in the frontline in influencing children to engage in drug and substance abuse in that they perceive what their parents are doing as cool, and this compels them to try and see whether they will look cool as well. As a result, they end up becoming addicted to drugs and substances, especially alcohol.

Addicted parents are neglectful, and this leaves the children with poor morals as they have to take care of themselves, and since there are no restrictions, they end up trying all kinds of drugs. Developing and enforcing policies can help reduce the menace of children’s drug addiction. Child welfare services should take away children with addictive or abusive parents and take them to foster care, where they will be raised away from drugs. As a result, they will not be exposed to drugs and substances at a young age, and this will shield them until they are of legal age to make a decision on whether to take alcohol or not. The implications of the policy regarding taking away children from addicted families will greatly help in reducing drug addiction among both parents and children. Parents will have lesser responsibilities and, thus, less stress in taking care of children, and since most engaged in drugs and substance abuse due to depression caused by poverty, they have a chance to improve their lives by seeking employment opportunities and getting rehabilitated. Children will also be brought up in an environment free from drugs, and this will help them avoid taking drugs.

CONCLUSION

A family is a group of people related by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption that live together in the same home and interact with each other in their separate social roles, usually those of parents, spouses, siblings, and children. Social stratification theories consider the nuclear family as a solidary unit whose members share roughly the same social class rank. In addition, most people believe that the husband’s occupation is the best (or only) index of a family’s social status. Usually, working women are often overlooked as potential contributors to the same. Drug and substance abuse is a major social issue in the family. However, the existing literature concerning the impact of parents’ substance use on the onset of children’s drugs and substance use is limited in scope. The limited number of existing studies that examine the relationship between parents’ alcohol and substance use and adolescents’ substance abuse have also yielded inconclusive and inconsistent findings. It has been established that genetically informed research has yielded varied conclusions as to what degree parental drug usage contributes to child substance misuse and antisocial behavior owing to similar environmental and genetic variables. Therefore, there is a need to further explore how drug abuse between parents influences the upbringing of a child and the child’s engagement in drug and substance use, a gap that the proposed study seeks to fill. To achieve this goal, the proposed study will adopt a literature review design. Meta-analysis and systematic literature review will be applied. Data sources will be retrieved from reputable data sources, including Google Scholar, ProQuest, Sage publications, EbscoHost, and direct science databases.

References

Becoña, E., Martínez, Ú., Calafat, A., Juan, M., Fernández-Hermida, J. R., & Secades-Villa, R. (2012). Parental styles and drug use: A review. Drugs: education, prevention and policy, 19(1), 1-10.

Latvala, A., Kuja-Halkola, R., D’Onofrio, B. M., Jayaram-Lindström, N., Larsson, H., & Lichtenstein, P. (2022). Association of parental substance misuse with offspring substance misuse and criminality: a genetically informed register-based study. Psychological Medicine, 52(3), 496-505. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291720002135Lee, C. T., Padilla-Walker, L. M., & Memmott-Elison, M. K. (2017). The role of parents and peers on adolescents’ prosocial behavior and substance use. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 34(7), 1053-1069. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0265407516665928Raitasalo, K., Holmila, M., Jääskeläinen, M., & Santalahti, P. (2019). The effect of the severity of parental alcohol abuse on mental and behavioural disorders in children. European child & adolescent psychiatry, 28(7), 913-922.

Rusby, J. C., Light, J. M., Crowley, R., & Westling, E. (2018). Influence of parent–youth relationship, parental monitoring, and parental substance use on adolescent substance use onset. Journal of family psychology, 32(3), 310. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037%2Ffam0000350Schuler, M. S., Tucker, J. S., Pedersen, E. R., & D’Amico, E. J. (2019). Relative influence of perceived peer and family substance use on adolescent alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use across middle and high school. Addictive behaviors, 88, 99-105. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.addbeh.2018.08.025Shakya, H. B., Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2012). Parental influence on substance use in adolescent social networks. Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine, 166(12), 1132-1139.

Shek, D. T., Zhu, X., Dou, D., & Chai, W. (2020). Influence of family factors on substance use in early adolescents: A longitudinal study in Hong Kong. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 52(1), 66-76.

Solis, J., M Shadur, J., R Burns, A., & M Hussong, A. (2012). Understanding the diverse needs of children whose parents abuse substances. Current drug abuse reviews, 5(2), 135-147.

van Amsterdam, J., Pierce, M., & van den Brink, W. (2021). Is Europe facing an emerging opioid crisis comparable to the US?. Therapeutic drug monitoring, 43(1), 42-51.