Can Parenting Prevent Addiction?

The Hurdles Of Protecting Your Children

Your life is shaped by your upbringing. A lot of the worst people in the world are shaped by their childhoods. If you research different serial killers, there is one thing they all have in common.

Horrible childhoods. Abusive, chaotic, harmful. Not everyone with an awful childhood will become a serial killer, but it can contribute greatly to negative patterns later in life.

One of these patterns we often see is addiction. What can parents do to protect their children from addiction? Can Parenting Prevent Addiction? There are a lot of methods that work.

Having parents who are present, interested, and engaged with you as you grow plays a huge role in building self-esteem. A big reason why people turn to drugs and alcohol is to hide the lack of confidence that exists within them. Positive reinforcement goes a very long way.

I was raised in a very abusive household, and I never got the reinforcement I so desperately needed. It made me grow up with an extremely poor sense of self.

There was overall hopelessness in my upbringing that led me to develop drug and alcohol addictions. Using drugs was a great way for me to bury the pain and lack of self-worth.

Can Parenting Prevent Addiction

Does bad parenting cause addiction? It plays a role. Ultimately you make the decision to use drugs or not but having bad parents absolutely can set you on that path.

I’ve known a lot of people with horrible upbringings that never fell victim to addiction, but I know way more people whose difficult childhoods caused them to fall into the cycle of drug abuse.

When you are a parent, you are playing a key role in the mental and emotional development of another human being. It’s a very vital and important role that you are taking on. Unfortunately, a lot of parents fail to understand that.

A Bad Childhood Makes For a Bad Adulthood

I personally feel that the reason addiction has become such a huge issue for so many people can be attributed to your upbringing. Bad parenting is a gigantic reason why there are so many addicts in this country and on this planet. We are shaped by our upbringings.

The way that we view the world is a result of what we learn growing up. If you have parents who are consistently in a negative frame of mind, it rubs off. If you are the child of addicts, it rubs off.

My parents were alcoholics. Basically, my entire family was alcoholics. Alcoholism was the norm in my world. It seemed like a natural progression for me to become one as well. It was predetermined.

I became an alcoholic because I viewed alcoholism as normal. Once I got out into the world and realized that not everyone else was an alcoholic, it came as a huge shock. The people I associated with all my life were in the thick of addiction.

Once I met people who weren’t it was a totally alien concept to me. You can actually go through life not drunk all the time? It didn’t seem real at all.

That’s not to say that if you have a great childhood you aren’t going to have issues. I’ve met plenty of people in rehab who had everything they wanted growing up, and they still became addicts.

As a matter of fact, them getting everything they wanted was a contributing factor to their addiction. When you are spoiled and are led to believe you’ll have whatever you want in life, it can be a huge detriment to your development.

Once you get out in the world and realize not everything will be handed to you, one way to cope with that is through drugs and alcohol.

Can good parenting prevent addiction? It can certainly play a vital role. Having kids is a crapshoot. You do the best you can, but ultimately everyone is in control of their own destiny.

I’ve known a lot of addicts who had good parents. Their parents did everything they could to steer their kids the right way, but it’s not always going to work out. You do the best you can and that’s really all it comes down to. We all make up our own minds.

How To Help A Child Battling Addiction

If your child develops an addiction, it can be the ultimate heartbreaker. You’ve done everything you thought you could to prevent it, and it still happened. It can create a lot of despair. The truly important thing is how you react to it.

You don’t want to make your child feel like they’ve failed you. The next step is to be logical and practical. You can wallow and beat yourself up over it, but that isn’t going to solve the issue.

There are many parenting tips to prevent addiction. There are also just as many solutions if your child has already become an addict.

You aren’t going to solve someone else’s problem, but you can be a beacon. You can set an example and do whatever it is in your power to offer help. Again, spending too much time wondering what you did wrong or how you could have prevented it isn’t going to solve anything.

Focus on what you can control and how you can be of assistance. If you truly care about your child’s well-being, there are many things you can do to get them back on the right track.

Seeking professional help for a child struggling with addiction doesn’t have the stigma that it once did. There are countless families out there who must endure this struggle. When you realize that you are not alone, it can be a big sigh of relief and a point of hope.

There are so many options out there as far as professional help goes. Because childhood substance abuse is so prevalent in our society, there are many professionals out there who specialize just in treating childhood addiction.

You must remember that you haven’t failed as a parent if your child is struggling. You can feel like there are things you could have done, but you have to keep your focus on solving the problem and not contributing to it.

Parenting is difficult enough. It’s hard enough to do all the right things. You are most likely going to make mistakes. Good parenting isn’t about preventing every bad thing from happening.

It’s about providing real solutions when bad things do happen because they are going to happen no matter what. There’s no reason you can’t be the change and become a cause of your child’s success.