How To Talk To A Child About A Family Member’s Addiction

How do you talk to a young child about a family member’s addiction to alcohol or drugs? How do you talk about a parent’s drug addiction or a teenager’s substance abuse? Phrases like your “Dad’s an alcoholic” or “Your big sister is addicted to cocaine” fail to describe anything to a child. Naturally, the younger the child, the use of words beyond their vocabulary level makes no sense.

While a child may understand that there is a problem, they may not be mature enough to understand how substance abuse affects the family member’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior. For instance, an alcoholic may be kind, loving and fun when they are sober, but express a mean and angry personality when intoxicated.

How NOT to Address the Issue

Unfortunately, the default way of handling addiction problems in the home is to either make evasive statements, lie, or just try to ignore the issue.

Saying “you’ll understand better when you grow up” is evasive. It’s particularly frightening if something that demands an explanation is not being addressed. If a father is handcuffed by police and put into the back of a police car for domestic violence, the child may be petrified.

Saying “your sister is going away on a long vacation” is a lie if the teenage sister is actually going to an addiction treatment center. This becomes even more mystifying when the family member is crying on their way out of the door. “Do vacations make people sad?” the child wanders.

And saying nothing at all is trying to ignore the issue. This builds immense distrust in the child. No one can be trusted to explain what is going on when bad things happen.

Seeds of Chaos

What happens inside a child’s mind after a chaotic event related to substance abuse is tremendous confusion. They may observe people doing strange things going on:

• An alcoholic father might be hitting his wife when drunk and the epitome of care and concern when sober.
• The police may be in and out of the house asking questions and writing things down when a family member disappears for a few days.
• A beloved member may leave the house for months after strangers come in and do an intervention to escort the family member to a rehab clinic.

Since everyone in the house is upset by these incidents but nobody offers a clear explanation, the child fills in the gaps with their own imagination. These are usually illogical, dark explanations where they take full responsibility for things that had nothing to do with them. “They took Tammie away because I didn’t brush my teeth and go to bed when Mommy asked nicely yesterday.”

The result of all this confusion is that children often face emotional disorders, cause behavior problems in school, or have the lowest grades in their class because they can’t pay attention to the teacher.

The type of addiction is not really important, but the family member’s behavior initiated by the substance abuse that causes trauma in a child.

According to a government report on alcoholism, “Families with alcoholism have higher levels of conflict than other families. Lack of adequate parenting and poor home management and family communication skills often leave children without effective training and role modeling.”

Addiction problems, whether they are due to alcohol or other forms of substance abuse, can create a whole chain of negative life experiences for the child as they grow up. Underperforming at school is just the beginning, they may also get jobs that underpay, marry an addict and raise families where they abuse and neglect their own children.

How to Talk to a Child about Substance Abuse

The best time to address an addiction issue in the home to a child is shortly after it happens.

In fact, the problem itself is not the real problem. It’s the memory of the problem. Even if the original problem is resolved – say, the father goes into rehab, permanently quits alcohol and becomes a model husband and father – the memories of the frightening event are now lodged in the subconscious mind and cause damage for decades.

Here are 7 ways to handle the discussion.

1. Wait for an appropriate time to have the conversation when everything has calmed down and you can have a long discussion.
2. Keep the conversation age appropriate. Using words that the child does not understand only adds to the confusion. Explain what you mean using analogies the child understands.
3. Tell the truth and don’t try to mitigate the issue or postpone an explanation.
4. Understand what you are talking about by studying the addiction so that you can offer a clear explanation as to why people under the influence of a substance behave the way they do.
5. Acknowledge how the child feels, as well as what other family members are going through.
6. Free the child from taking on the burden of responsibility. You have to help the child understand that the family member’s addiction is not their fault.
7. Ask for a response and invite a dialogue. Get the child to open up and share their feelings. Clear up any misunderstandings.

Reassure the Child

Children invariably jump to the conclusion that they had something to do with the substance abuse. They have to be reassured that they didn’t cause it and made aware that they can’t control or cure it.