Secondary Effects of Parent Treatment for Drug Abuse on Children

As they move from preadolescence to adolescence and adulthood, children need nurturing and supportive environments to realize their potential. Unfortunately, many children reside in destructive families that often result in negative short and long-term outcomes. As well-chronicled in the scientific and lay press, an all-too-common example involves parental substance abuse. Indeed, children living with a parent who abuses substances often have significant emotional, behavioral, and social problems. It has long been recognized that interventions are needed to address the clinical needs of these youth and to help prevent the development of problems that may emerge in early adulthood. To date, the majority of treatments have focused on either treating the children individually, or in the context of family therapy. Although directly involving these youth in treatment may be ideal, the majority of custodial parents who enter treatment for substance abuse are very reluctant to allow their children to engage in individual or family therapy. Thus, interventions for substance-abusing parents that do not directly involve children, but serve to improve the family environment as a whole, may have the greatest potential for reaching the most children and thereby positively influencing their overall adjustment and well-being. From this vantage, a promising approach is Behavioral Couples Therapy \[BCT\] for alcoholism and drug abuse, a comprehensive psychosocial intervention for substance abuse that focuses both on reducing addiction severity, improving couple adjustment, reducing interparental conflict and intimate partner violence (IPV), and improving the family environment and psychological functioning. In a series of preliminary studies, the PI found that children whose substance-abusing fathers and nonsubstance-abusing mothers participated in BCT displayed higher psychosocial adjustment at posttreatment and during an extended follow-up than youth whose substance-abusing fathe