In a series of posts here at AddictionNews, my colleague Pat Hartman has described the genetic component of addiction, particularly alcohol use disorder, for which the data goes further back than other addictions. It is widely stated that 50% of the “cause” of alcoholism is due to genetics. If you have parents who are alcoholics, you are 50% more likely to become one than the average person.

Hold that thought for a moment and let me attach it to a statistic from JAMA Pediatrics published just last month: One in every four children in the United States is being raised in a family with an addicted parent. That’s 19 million kids. That’s an increase of 2 million kids in three years — nearly a 12% increase since 2020.

Twelve million parents or caregivers “meet the criteria for some form of alcohol use disorder,” say researchers from the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking, and Health, or DASH. They estimate six million parents or caregivers suffer from cannabis use disorder, and three million have polysubstance abuse issues.

The estimates are based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which has been conducted annually since the 1970s by SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which was just defunded and merged into Health and Human Services’ America’s Health Association (HAHA). According to an article at SciTechDaily, “The survey’s entire staff received layoff notices in April.”

What’s it like being raised in a family where one or more parent or caregiver is a victim of substance use disorder? According to the researchers, here’s what the kids have to look forward to:

• increased likelihood of having “adverse childhood experiences”
• increased likelihood of using alcohol earlier and more often
• increased likelihood of using drugs earlier and more often
• increased likelihood of being diagnosed with mental health disorders

As these children age into becoming parents themselves, the genetic inheritance is passed along, and the cycle renews. Sean Esteban McCabe, Director of the DASH Center and lead author of the new study, told SciTechDaily:

[The] fact that one in four children now live with parental substance use disorder brings more urgency to the need to help connect parents to effective treatments, expand early intervention resources for children, and reduce the risk that children will go on to develop substance use issues of their own.

Our societal approach to an alarming increase in the number of children raised in households headed by someone with a substance use disorder cannot be to simply stop counting. Closing SAMHSA won’t solve the problem, it will make it far worse. Stopping a 50-year-long survey into substance abuse will not make those problems go away. 

We have interventions we know work, and we only know they work because of all the hard science behind them that SAMHSA has funded. These therapies include:

Parent Child Interactive Therapy. Many new parents simply don’t know how to parent. For example, they don’t know what to do when the baby cries. A few sessions with a therapist, and new parents learn to interpret babies and respond accordingly.

Storytelling for Resilience. Episodic future thinking is key to building resilience to overcome hurdles in achieving goals. It can be fostered at a very young age through storytelling, journaling, and educational games.

Medicine-Assisted Therapies. These work well for the first 90 days, then the cognitive behavioral therapy has to kick in to keep caregivers from relapsing. The drugs and therapies are covered by most insurance plans, including Medicare and Medicaid.

Thanks to SciTechDaily and the University of Michigan’s DASH Center for sounding the alarm on the cascading problem of generational substance abuse, while we can still track the problem other than by counting the number of people sleeping in doorways.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published June 3, 2025.

Sources:

“1 in 4 Kids Lives With a Parent Battling Addiction, Alarming Study Finds,” SciTechDaily, May 23, 2025.

“US Children Living With a Parent With Substance Use Disorder,” JAMA Pediatrics, May 12, 2025.

“2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health,” Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, February 13, 2025.

Image Copyright: serezniy.