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Drugs in the Family: the Impact on Parents and Siblings

Marina Barnard

Published by Joseph Rowntree Foundation

When a young person develops a drug problem, it has a profound effect on all family members, throwing family relationships into crisis and increasing the chances that younger brothers and sisters will also become problem drug users.

Yet government policy and professional practice tend to focus exclusively on the individual drug user themselves, ignoring the damaging impact on parents and siblings, as this study points out.

Families were "almost universally thrown into shocked disarray" by the discovery that one of their children had developed a problem with drugs, the study finds. "For most, if not all, families it was an event of such deep significance that it completely and forever changed the family and its sense of itself."

Initially, all the families tried to contain the problem without seeking support from other agencies and felt a ashamed. Parents who did join family support groups found them helpful, but this happened only after years of living with a child with a drug problem.

Parents often argued bitterly about how to respond to their child, especially when money and property was being stolen from the family home by the drug user.

Siblings felt that their parents were focusing all their time and attention on the child with the drug problem, but they were also drawn into the problem both to try to prevent their sibling stealing from the family and as mediators between their parents and the drug user.

The research found that, as a result of their older sibling's drug problem, younger brothers and sisters were themselves exposed to drugs. Many saw their older sibling taking drugs and became familiar with the equipment they used with some becoming curious about trying them. Children who did not follow in their older siblings' drug-using footsteps said this was because of the effects they saw it having on the drug user and the rest of the family.

www.jrf.org.uk