Parents Need Help Too

Problems at home, specifically dealing with parents, can be a cause for substance abuse with teens. When we look at this issue we focus on the teens who are struggling with abuse and try to help them overcome their addiction. Not much attention is paid to the parents of the teens and how these situations can possibly affect them. Could the stress of having a child abuse a substance result in poor parenting? There have been studies done to examine the impact of teaching parents training skills to deal with abuse, while their child was in recovery. These produced good results, as teens cited the support of their parents as a major influence in their recovery. Unfortunately only a small percentage of teens who need treatment actually receive it, which leaves many more parents still in need of help.

A study was conducted to determine if Coping Skills Training (CTS) or Twelve Step Facilitation (TSF) helped parents of substance abusing teens reduce stress and the frequency of substance abuse related problems. 85 parents were qualified and participated in the study, of which 66 were participating alone, and in the remaining families both parents participated. 12, 2 hour sessions were held over 12 weeks. The parents in CTS group were taught to see their problems from a stress and coping model. They focused on learning effective coping and problem solving skills. They were taught situation-specific response and participated in role-play. The parents in the FST group were taught to view their problems as codependence and focused on the 12 steps of Nar-Anon. The meetings focused on the first five steps (enabling, codependence relapse, etc.) the parents were presented with the same problem situations as those in the CTS group, but they discussed codependence and the 12 steps, and were not advised on effective and ineffective responses to the situations. FST participants were also urged to participate in local 12 step meetings.

Using the Parent Situation Inventory to measure the results, it was found that the CTS parents were more skillful than the TSF parents. There was no significant difference in parental stress. Both treatments showed progresses in parental functioning and reduction in the number of problems. As with all studies, there were a few flaws, such as a small sample size, and the fact that fact that what were reported as “problems” by the parents were subjective.

This study introduces an overlooked problem and presents a solution. We can now see that there is a need for help to be provided for parents of teens abusing substances. From these results we can conclude that both cognitive skills training and 12 step facilitation can be used to help the parents cope with their child’s addiction and teach them ways to handle problems.

Abstract

McGillicuddy, N.B., et al., Skill training versus 12-step facilitation for parents of substance-abusing teens, Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment (2014)