In the past, this column has focused on students with a family history or Children of Substance Abusers (COSAs) and what you as a counselor can do to support them. There are literally millions of Americans who have experienced parental substance abuse. According to statistics, one in eight Americans are COSAs who eventually grow up to become adults. Most of them have learned to cope and benefit from the challenges of their experiences. However, many still suffer, often in silence from their painful past, influencing their life as an adult and their ability to feel good about being a parent.

While many adult COSAs may not like to admit it, inside they still may be carrying around the hurt, mistrust, fear, shame, embarrassment and anger they felt as a child. They may have denied those feelings when they were young -- and they may still ignore them today.

How does being an adult COSA influence parenting?

For adult COSAs, creating a new family of their own can bring up a whole range of unanticipated emotions. Parenting is both exciting and nerve-wracking for most people. But adults who grew up with a parent with an alcohol or drug problem, might have an added insecurity. Without healthy role models or parental support, adult COSAS may have questions and frustrations that set them apart from others.

It’s important for adult COSAs to be reassured that just because they feel unsure and incompetent as a parent doesn’t mean that they are. One of the most important lessons for adults who grew up in substance abusing families is that there isn’t one way to be a family, nor is there one right way to parent. And there are skills – trust, communication, problem-solving and discipline – that can be learned and developed, and can make the experience a little easier.

Adults whose parents abused alcohol or other drugs do have different levels of knowledge about parental substance abuse and how it has affected them as adults and as parents. An adult COSA may also still believe (incorrectly) that somehow, they were responsible for their parent’s alcohol or drug problem.

As a child, they might have relied on a particular "coping style" to get them through things. While this behavior style allowed them to cope with their family situation back then, they might be causing problems for them now as a parent. Below is a list of situations that might feel familiar to adult COSAs:

• Trying too hard to be the perfect parent
• Demanding more from a child than is realistic
• Taking over tasks or problems their children could handle by themselves
• Be overly concerned about the child’s health and safety
• Experiencing unusual stress or guilt
• Being afraid to set age-appropriate limits
• Having difficulty with their children’s dependency needs
• Being less emotionally available to their children when sad or depressed
• Finding it difficult to pay attention to own needs
• Making light of their children’s feelings or denying their own
• Avoiding intimacy and/or using humor to keep a child at a distance or to avoid dealing with problems
• Being overly concerned their children will get into trouble and or break the law
• Using one child as a scapegoat for family troubles
• Being physically or verbally abusive or being fearful of doing so

What you can do

Many parents who are COSAs do not talk about their histories, but they are hungry nonetheless for information and support. Although it’s not directly your job to serve your students’ parents, you will do your students a great service by helping to de-stigmatize parental substance abuse and raise awareness of support resources for families affected by addiction. When parents have the help they need to do their best work as parents, their children are better able to focus on being students and growing up healthy.

Here are a couple things you might consider:

• Although not always the case, COSAs are three times more likely than their non-COA peers to have their own problems with substance abuse. (SeeChildren and Families Affected by Substance Abuse for ways to support students with a family history.)
• Provide a parenting class or connect with a local community organization providing classes to offer one at your school. A few parenting curricula specific to COSAs exist. For example, Discovering Normal, is available from COAF.
• Include a flyer or notice in with other communications to parents about the availability of community resources specific to parents who are COSAs
• Provide resources and referrals. Many adult COSAs may feel guilty about seeking help, especially if the family substance abuse was kept a secret from others. It may be difficult to get them to rely on you for support or even trust you. However, you can still provide a resource shelf of literature and a list of local support groups in the area that parents can anonymously peruse next time they come in to see you about their child.
• Reach out to your school’s PTA or other parent group. Ask if you can have a few moments of the next meeting to talk about some of the general issues that often face families with a history of substance abuse. Find out if the PTA or parent group has any type of support groups for parents, particularly one for adult COAs. If one doesn’t exist, see if you could facilitate a new one.

As the parable goes, “it takes a village to raise a child.” It may feel sometimes like you have to look after the whole village. You may not consider parents to be part of your responsibility. But to break the cycle of intergenerational substance abuse, it’s necessary to look at the entire family in order to help a child. You may never know for sure if there is substance abuse in a particular family, but you can assume that at least a few families in any given school community face a family history of substance abuse and its important to remember to implement the protective factors which will help students (and their families) to live healthy, substance-free lives.