Children of addicted parents are at a higher risk of becoming addicted as well later on in life. Let’s take a peek into how children with addicted parents learn life differently compared to those children whose parents aren’t abusing drugs or alcohol.
In a household where adults are supposed to take care of the children, things can get pretty messy and dysfunctional when parents are addicted. The family dynamic becomes skewed as children learn a life different from those children whose parents are not involved in drug or alcohol addiction.
There are many drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities for people who are addicted to these substances. Most of these people are parents and they get treatment for their addiction so they can recover and come out as better, more productive, sober people. But while there is help for these adults, what is happening to their kids? Who are helping their children, young ones who are exposed to an early life of dysfunction brought by their parents’ active addiction?
This issue must be raised because many, if not all, children who grow up in a household with addicted parents suffer trauma in one form or another. They experience physical, sexual, or psychological abuse, directly or indirectly, due to their parents’ addiction.
And while physical scars may heal, emotional and psychological wounds can scar these children for life. What happens to children as they grow up with addicted parents who may abuse them can affect their self-esteem and how they view life in general. Their behavior, attitude, and value system will be different.
Here are what children can learn from growing up with addicted parents:
1. They will learn that life revolved around their addicted parents’ needs. They will feel unimportant, as home life is life treading on thin ice. The troubles at home, even domestic violence, can be skewed in the eyes of the child that they will believe everything is their fault. While it’s hard to really make sense of things, eventually, children will stop asking questions and accept the world they are living in, without a voice nor stability in their life.
2. They will learn not to trust. At a very early age, perhaps children will look forward to getting gifts, or simply a birthday party not going wrong. Perhaps they will look forward to being invited to play dates. However, because of their parents’ addicted behavior, children’s hopes become crushed. Eventually, it becomes hard for them to trust their parents and even other adults because they think everyone will just let them down. These children will grow up being resentful, suspicious, and distrustful. They themselves may even put a low value on trust, making them untrustworthy as well.
3. They will learn to suppress their feelings. As children, their emotions may be erratic, but they are still learning to cope and control their feelings. However, at a very young age, they were reprimanded or even hurt for showing their emotions or acting on their feelings. In an already emotionally loaded and tense household, they will eventually learn to keep their feelings to themselves, even shut down. They may also learn unhealthy coping habits because they never learned positive outlets for expressing themselves.
Children like these do not develop a healthy coping mechanism for all the challenges that life has in store for them. They also have very little self-worth and self-respect. As a result, they are also easy targets for addiction.
They tend to indulge in risky behavior, seek external forms of coping, and seek things or other people to validate them. This may steer them into being introduced to drugs and alcohol early, which also exposes them to develop addiction earlier on in life. After all, they may see substance abuse on a daily basis at home, so environment and genetics already play a big role on them.
[…] struggle for some semblance of balance, order, and normalcy. Alcoholic parents may even tend to be abusive of their children and other family members. This abuse is not necessarily physical, but also psychological and […]