Seeing your son or daughter struggling with substance abuse or addiction can be a devastating experience, and blaming yourself for your kid’s choices is all too common in such cases. But is that really enough to help your child get out of that dark tunnel of addiction?
No! In fact, it may leave even more adverse effects on your life as well. Therefore, if you want to play a responsible parent’s role and take your child towards a long-lasting recovery, understanding the link between parenting and addiction is your priority. This can create wonders and shape your son or daughter’s recovery process much better than you could ever imagine.
We are social animals, and our actions impact people in many ways. The extent of the impact can be less or more, but they reveal the aftereffects for sure. It may take minutes, days, weeks, months or even years to reflect, but the consequences are definite. With that being said, this concept is nowhere more apparent than the relationship between parents and their kids.
Parenting is not an easy job. You need to have a lot of courage and energy to be a successful parent. Being a parent, there are situations where you have to leap without even knowing the results.
Every parent hopes their children to be successful in their lives. For this to happen, you teach them the importance of discipline, ambitions and more. When they follow your words, you reward them as well. Even after all of these efforts, you can just hope that this will work in favor of your child in the future.
However, many parents do not realize that certain lifestyles and actions may negatively impact their children and push them in the wrong direction. Sadly, some of such paths take them to the ghost of addiction.
How To Address The Shame & Guilt Arose Due To Child’s Addiction
It is natural to feel worried about your addicted child. You may think that your poor parenting skills led to your child’s addiction, and you now don’t know how to handle it.
You start feeling guilty and ashamed of yourself for not helping or supporting your child struggling with addiction. And this is how the cycle of self-blaming begins.
Now, there is a catch, and it might be somewhat relieving for you.
Addiction is a very complex disease, and parenting can never be the only cause of it. It indeed can contribute to the habit of substance abuse, but self-blaming is not going to help either you or your addicted child.
Overthinking about how it started or the primary cause of his or her addiction can yield nothing but negativity. Instead, you have to gather as much as knowledge you can about the relationship of drug addiction and parenting so that you can use it for the faster and better recovery of your child.
With your smart decisions, you can provide optimum support to speed up your child’s healing.
What Is The Relation Between Addiction And Parenting?
Kids learn from their parents. For many years, experts highlighted the idea that attachments are the root cause of most addiction cases.
Now, how we handle attachments depends on our relationship with our parents in the early days. It shapes our future interpersonal relationships that may lead to addiction. Therefore, you need to understand addiction’s connection with your parent-child relationship if you want to help your kid recover from addiction.
Neglectful Parenting
Such parents do not focus on their children as much as they are supposed to.
They don’t significantly take part in their lives, don’t pay attention to what they need, or lack the required affection. Ultimately, they end up distancing themselves from their kids.
Unfortunately, this lifestyle happens unintentionally in most cases. Parents get so busy in their personal lives that they forget to focus on their child’s requirements. Many such uninvolved parents do not realize this before seeing the harmful effects of their lifestyle on their children.
Whether it is demanding working hours, stress, emotional or physical struggles that stop you from engaging with your children, the results remain the same.
Such a parenting style is dangerous for yourself and your child as it develops insecure attachments. And out of all, such weak relationships are more likely to lead to addiction.
Children of such parents often try to manage their issues independently, and the solution to their problems mostly involves drugs or alcohol.
Permissive Parenting
Over nurturing is also a problematic parenting style as it can make children dependent on you to a dangerous level. Permissive parents often expect nothing solid from their kids in terms of grades, chores, homework, sports, good habits and more. Such kids get excessive freedom to behave the way they want.
They get their parents’ attention all the time. No matter what they ask, need or want, their parents are quick to respond. Moreover, they do not get punished even after misbehaving.
This develops unhealthy habits related to discipline, self-control, and attitude in the child. It also creates an anxious attachment style that involves intense fear of abandonment and affirmation desires.
Ultimately, it creates more chances for a child to fall for substances and even lead to anxiety issues.
Authoritarian Parenting
In this parenting method, children are often forced to follow the parents’ rules and regulations. Such parents are adamant on their guidelines and fail to develop mutual understanding with their kids in the long run.
They punish their kids if they misbehave, and unlike authoritative parents, they may not offer any explanation of why he or she got punished.
Such parenting styles lead to insecure and weak bonding between you and the children. Kids do not feel emotionally attached to such parents and try to deal with their struggles on their own. Down the road, their chances of falling for drugs or alcohol addiction increases.
Be A Smart Parent & Defeat The Addiction
We all make mistakes in our lives. There is no point in digging out the past and getting stuck in the self-blame game cycle. Seeking reliable alcohol rehab in California is your first step to regain the sobriety of your child. This is only possible when you keep the fear, shame, and guilt aside and act for the betterment of your child.
