The Family Disease: The Effects of Substance Abuse on Children: Background information when reading Dog Flowers

The Family Disease: The Effects of Substance Abuse on Children

This article relates to Dog Flowers

Danielle Geller's memoir Dog Flowers portrays how both of her parents struggled with substance abuse. Her mother, Tweety, drank heavily, stopped cold turkey and suffered seizures. Her father, Michael, had a long history of drug use, psychotic episodes and violence. National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) data estimates that 8.7 million children aged 17 years or younger in the United States — about 12.3% of children in the country overall — are living with at least one parent with a substance abuse disorder. About 10.5% live with a parent with an alcohol abuse disorder and about 2.9% live with a parent with an illicit drug use disorder.

Addiction is often called a "family disease" because of the collateral damage. It is not just those who abuse alcohol and drugs who suffer, but everyone in their immediate orbit. Because parents with addictions are often unable to establish routines, set boundaries, be emotionally and physically available, or resist negative impulses and delusions, they can inadvertently push their children into isolation and depression. They may think they are taking good care of their children while under the influence but overestimate their competence, forgetting or treating with indifference details like getting children to school on time, scheduling doctor's appointments, supervising and being present in general.

In her memoir, Geller describes how she entered psychiatric care after a lifetime of chaos and now yearns for its routines: "Sometimes, when I am at my lowest, I still pine for the week I spent in the psychiatric ward... The nurses oversaw a strict schedule packed with light exercise, arts and crafts, and mandatory sessions with the staff psychiatrist and counselor to manage our medications and our moods. They gave us balanced meals on neatly partitioned trays that arrived at the same time every day. They cared for us in a way I have never been able to care for myself." Often, parents who are addicts are impulsive and abusive, and therefore cannot model responsibility for their children.

Geller's sister Eileen, the more social of the two of them, began hanging around with the wrong group of friends and emulating her parents' substance abuse, despite the irrationality of this mirroring. Geller writes of her sister, "I couldn't understand why she chose to drink, when drinking had already cost us so much." But Eileen's behavior is not unusual, as children tend to model the coping mechanisms of their environments. Statistics show that when parents abuse substances, the likelihood that their children will also abuse substances increases. According to NSDUH data, children of drug-addicted and alcoholic parents are four times more likely to develop addictions themselves. Children may use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate because their parents have normalized it. Additionally, many children of addicts develop impulsive behavior. They are also more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. After attempting suicide, Danielle had "the feeling that nothing would change." She went to counseling and said that she wanted to be happy, she wanted her family to be normal. Unfortunately, for many children of addicts such as the Gellers, normal is abnormal.

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This article relates to Dog Flowers. It first ran in the January 20, 2021 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.