The Impact of Parental Addiction on Children and Young People: A Trauma-Informed Perspective
This article is written from a personal and professional perspective; interweaving my childhood experiences of parental heroin addiction with 30 years of child protection leadership, consulting and training across Australia and New Zealand. Both these contexts inform my understanding of this critical topic.
Introduction
Parental addiction is a significant risk factor in child protection. It can disrupt daily life, hinder parents from meeting their child’s needs, and create instability and stress. This can deeply affect a child’s safety, sense of belonging, and well-being.
The 2023-24 Annual Report from the Queensland Child Death Review Board outlines the dangers children face due to parental substance use, including neglect, harm, trauma, and death, with recommendations for upskilling professionals in risk assessment and understanding the impacts of parental addiction. These issues were also noted in the previous report.
As a previous member of New Zealand’s Child Mortality Review Group, I know all too well that parental addiction has been a common theme in child maltreatment deaths for many years, extending beyond Queensland. Addiction can result in chaotic and unsafe environments, inadequate supervision, poor attachment, unmet basic needs, and chronic exposure to stress.
A Trauma-Informed Perspective
Addiction is a way of escaping the unwanted realities of life. Addiction becomes the reality of avoiding reality.
This article does not blame or shame parents. A trauma-informed approach acknowledges that parents with addiction often have their own trauma history, using substances as an emotional band aid. This perspective removes judgement and aims to understand and support without causing further harm. While parents are responsible for their children’s care, this understanding provides a basis for effective intervention.
Recognising trauma in the context of parental addiction means understanding that:
- Parental addiction disrupts a child’s fundamental sense of safety and security, affecting their development and attachment.
- Chronic and overwhelming experiences increase the risk of poor health and life outcomes, including mental health challenges and diminished personal agency.
- Trauma can alter gene expression, increasing vulnerability to mental health and addiction issues across generations.
- Unresolved trauma can perpetuate cycles of harm, poverty, and offending behaviours. Without effective intervention, the impact of trauma can find a way to repeat itself.
Importantly… being trauma-informed also means believing that:
- Trauma-informed care can support and guide healing.
- Post-trauma growth, healing, and transformation are possible for everyone impacted by adversity – trauma alchemy exists.
- Neuroplasticity offers an opportunity to rewire the brain and develop new habits.
- Heart-mind-body practices can increase resilience from a neuroscience perspective.
- The experiences and effects of trauma are unique, so too, is the healing journey.
Trauma-informed care involves effectively supporting children, young people, and families affected by parental addiction. Children do not exist in isolation. As healing occurs within the context of relationships, strengthening family and community connections, where possible, is crucial.
Critical Risk Factors
Parental addiction carries with it numerous challenges that can present significant developmental, wellbeing and safety risks for children and young people.
Common risk factors include, but are not limited to:
– Lack of a stable and safe home environment: Frequent changes in living arrangements, unsafe housing conditions, threats of eviction, and the presence of unsafe individuals can create instability and safety risks.
– Emotional neglect and poor attachment: A non-addicted parent may become enmeshed in caring for their addicted partner, neglecting the child’s emotional needs. The child can end up feeling unseen, undervalued and unimportant.
– Financial hardship and poverty: Substance use can lead to financial difficulties. Poverty may limit access to education, opportunities, and essentials, creating feelings of exclusion, hopelessness, and lower self-worth.
– Decreased sense of belonging: Children in these environments can lack social connections and opportunities that contribute to a sense of identity and belonging. Parental addiction takes precedence in influencing the child’s worldview.
– Lack of structure and routine: A chaotic home life can lead to inconsistent parenting and insecure or ambivalent attachment, further destabilising a child’s sense of security.
– Educational disadvantage: Unmet emotional and physical needs can contribute to academic disengagement, social difficulties, behavioural issues in the educational context and learning difficulties.
– Parentification: Children may take on parental responsibilities, such as caring for siblings or emotionally supporting the addicted parent.
The Harmful Effects
The presence of various risk factors in households with parental addiction can result in adverse effects.
In addition to what is alluded to above, this can include:
- Neglect, abuse, trauma and emotional distress.
- Social, emotional and behavioural problems.
- Mental health issues, including self-harm and suicidal ideation.
- Poor concentration, affecting learning and being able to function in an educational or work environment.
- Social isolation, e.g. due to attachment style, impacts on social development, social functioning and disadvantages.
- Using substances as their own emotional band aid (2-4x increased risk).
- Offending behaviours, resulting from factors such as poverty, addiction, and needing to belong.
- Ending up in unsafe and unhealthy.
Children and young people may face misunderstanding, judgement, criticism, and punishment for the outwards expressions of their inner turmoil. Some develop substance use problems, are placed in detention centres, engage in self-harm or harm others, join youth gangs, end their lives, or enter into abusive and unhealthy relationships.
Long-Term Emotional & Psychological Impacts
Research consistently highlights that parental addiction, an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), can lead to poor health and life outcomes. Vulnerability increases when combined with other adverse experiences like family violence, incarceration of a parent, and child neglect. Very rarely is parental addiction a single factor.
Children and young people often develop survival mechanisms that affect them across their lifespan. Trauma symptoms can appear in later adolescence or adulthood, such as mental health issues, justice system involvement, educational struggles, or unhealthy relationship patterns.
The emotional impacts and survival needs may manifest in externalised behaviors, such as aggression, offending and risk-taking, or internalised struggles, including anxiety, depression, high-achieving and perfectionism. These patterns can originate in childhood and persist in adulthood.
Emotional and psychological impacts can include:
– Fear, hypervigilance and chronic stress: Growing up in an unpredictable environment can cause individuals to be highly sensitive to potential threats, leading to difficulties in being calm and emotionally regulated.
– Shame, stigma, and self-blame: Many children internalise family difficulties, believing they are responsible for their parents’ addiction and its consequences
– Loneliness and emotional isolation: The stigma surrounding addiction can lead to secrecy and a deep sense of being unseen and unheard. An emotional void can linger into adulthood.
– Difficulty forming healthy relationships: Attachment disruptions in childhood can result in problems with trust, emotional intimacy, and setting boundaries in adulthood. Enmeshment and co-dependent relationships are common.
– Excessively independence: Children can learn that others cannot be counted on to support them. Children can appear to be self-sufficient and resilient but may carry deep emotional scars. Children often learn to rely only on themselves, making it difficult to seek support or delegate responsibilities later in life
– Overly responsible: Taking care of others and being the ‘fixer’ and the ‘rescuer’ can stem from a parentified childhood. In adulthood, individuals may carry this burden, needing to fix or help others.
– Not meeting their own self-care needs: A lack of self-value and self-care can be created from a childhood focused on meeting the needs of an addicted parent and/or siblings.
– Emotional suppression and difficulty expressing needs: Emotional suppression can be a learned coping mechanism, from a childhood where it was unsafe to express fear, anger, sadness and other emotions. This can result in difficulty in recognising or verbalising personal needs and feelings, well into adulthood.
– Being caught in a cycle of poverty: Parental addiction can lead to poverty which, for children, goes deep into the psyche. Poverty is not only about a lack of resources, but it also erodes self-worth, hope, and emotional security. Without appropriate support, the cycles of poverty can be repeated.
– Heightened risk of substance use and maladaptive coping strategies: It is common for young people to use substances as they go into adulthood, not only because it has been their observed and experienced world as a child, but it also becomes their own emotional and social coping mechanism.
Breaking the Cycle: A Hopeful Perspective
While the effects of childhood trauma can be profound, they are not insurmountable.
As an overview, healing is possible through:
- Early and sustained intervention: Prioritising emotional well-being, not only a child or young person’s immediate safety. Responses to parental addiction need a long-term focus, even if the intervention itself is short-term.
- Recognition that each child’s trauma experience and healing journey is unique: Integrating the child’s voice, hopes and dreams; valuing their experience; and believing in their potential through individualised, care plans.
- Trauma-responsive support systems: Understanding the impact of parental addiction on children and young people, having competence in assessing risk and implementing effective pathways for healing and post-trauma growth.
- Developing protective factors: Providing family guidance, education and support to establish stable relationships, supportive environments, and access to health, community and social resources.
With the right support, trauma does not have to define a child’s health and life outcomes. By understanding the long-term impacts of parental addiction, we can create more responsive and compassionate systems that empower children, young people and their families to heal and thrive.
Call to Action
There is an urgent need for professional training in understanding the impact of parental addiction on children, assessing risk and building professional competence in responding effectively. For some children it is sadly too late, but right now, there are thousands and thousands of children living in homes where there is parental addiction, who need developmental, empathetic and trauma-responsive support.
If you are a professional working in child protection, mental health, addiction, family support, education, or other social services, investing in training can deepen your ability to:
There is an urgent need for professional training in understanding the impact of parental addiction on children, assessing risk and building professional competence in responding effectively. For some children it is sadly too late, but right now, there are thousands and thousands of children living in homes where there is parental addiction, who need developmental, empathetic and trauma-responsive support.
If you are a professional working in child protection, mental health, addiction, family support, education, or other social services, investing in training can deepen your ability to:
- Recognise and assess risk factors associated with parental addiction.
- Understand the impact on children and young people across their lifespan.
- Apply developmental, empathetic, and trauma-responsive approaches to intervention.
- Guide and support healing and post-trauma growth through evidence-informed and innovative strategies.
Training is relevant for all professionals working in mental health, addiction, child protection, youth justice, family support and wellbeing services.
Is your service ready to understand the impact of parental addiction on children and young people from a trauma-informed lens?
The need for understanding the effects of parental substance addiction on children and young people, having tools for assessing risk factors, and building competence to work effectively in this context is clear. Reach out to learn more about our professional training opportunities and how you can contribute to meaningful change in the minds, hearts and lives of children and young people who experience the effects of parental substance addiction.