Kids and the Recovery : Substance abuse: The children of recovering alcoholics and addicts find life can get harder when their parents kick the habit. Some have nowhere to turn.
The kindest thing Joanne Long did for her 10-year-old son was to send him to live with his grandmother so she could indulge in drugs and alcohol without guilt. But she assumed she would have a close, loving relationship with him once she decided to enter a detox program.
He thought the same thing.
“He used to come and visit me all the time in the recovery house and talk about what it was going to be like when I got out,” said Long, who asked that her real name not be used. “We both talked a lot about how good things would be between us.”
That’s not exactly how things have turned out. After staying off drugs and alcohol for a year, getting a job as a receptionist and renting a small apartment in Burbank, the sober 30-year-old mother has found that new emotional problems now have surfaced in her child.
“My reality and his fantasy just don’t match,” she said. “He’s got all of this anger at me now for abandoning him and he’s really remote. He doesn’t want to live with me.”
According to experts in the field of chemical dependency, their situation isn’t unusual. While recovering parents focus on pulling their lives together, children often are left on the emotional sidelines. In numerous cases, counselors say, children of recovering alcoholics and addicts are overwhelmed with sudden feelings of unresolved anger, fear, lack of trust or low self-esteem. Many feel they have nowhere to turn.
“A lot of times, things actually get harder for kids when their parents enter a recovery program,” said Jerry Moe, director of children’s services at Sequoia Hospital Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center in Redwood City and co-author of “Kids’ Power: Healing Games for Children of Alcoholics.”
“To help them survive all the chaos and crises through the years, kids have developed certain kinds of behavior. But when their parents start to recover, those coping mechanisms have to change,” Moe said. “That’s not always an easy task.”
One of the most difficult adjustments for many children, experts say, comes when recovering parents begin to reclaim some of the responsibilities they abandoned during their alcoholism or addiction.
Nicholas and Kristopher Lewis, 10- and 12-year-old brothers living in Van Nuys, said they usually stayed in parks until late at night and ate junk food for dinner while their single mother was out drinking in bars.
But a year ago, Leslie Lewis, 31, hit what she calls her “emotional bottom” and began a program of recovery. Not long afterward, things began to change.
She came home directly after work and cared about where her sons would be. Homework got checked in the evenings and dinner appeared on the table each night. It was no longer OK, she said, that their rooms resembled nuclear test sites.
Both boys say they are happy with their “new” mother and like the changes.
But Lewis said she suspects that, beneath the surface, all is not as calm as it appears. There have been uncharacteristic fights with other children, as well as a rock-throwing incident that left another child injured. Once, when she asked one son to clean up his room, he hit her.
‘No Boundaries’
“All of this is new, and it’s not easy for any of us. For all those years, they had no boundaries and now I’m suddenly trying to be a good parent and set down limits,” said Lewis, a paralegal in Los Angeles. “I may have to learn how to be a parent to them, but they have to learn how to have a parent.”
Disappointment also isn’t an uncommon emotion for children of recovering alcoholics. One father said that his 7-year-old son became silent and withdrawn after he began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings each night. After refusing to talk about what he was feeling, the boy finally blurted out what had been bothering him. “Nothing is different now that you don’t drink,” the boy said angrily. “You’re still gone all the time.”
Said Moe: “A lot of times, the feeling is, ‘You mean, this is all there is?’ They waited so long for the drugs or alcohol to stop, and then it’s nothing like they thought it would be. Instead of the fantasy parent they concocted, the person is just trying to hang on and stay sober.”
Then there is the loss of identity. When the parent begins to take back control, the child has to stop playing daddy or mommy.
Moe remembered one 8-year-old girl named Helen whose mother had been an alcoholic and Valium addict. Her father, a salesman, was never home. To cope with the emotional void in her life, Helen became the adult of the household, taking on the responsibilities for shopping, cooking, doing the laundry and caring for her younger brothers and sisters.
“She was 8 going on 40,” Moe said. “She learned that the way to survive was to take care of everyone else.”
But when her mother entered a recovery program, Helen was suddenly cut off from the only way she knew how to feel useful. “She began to wish that her mother would go back to drinking,” he said. “And that, of course, brought on terrible guilt and conflict for her.”
Other children, counselors say, may wish their parents would resume drinking if there once was more affection or permissiveness in their relationships.
Said one 13-year-old girl whose father has been sober for nearly six months: “I used to be able to do whatever I wanted, and now he always wants to know where I am. As far as I’m concerned, it’s kind of like, ‘Hey, you didn’t care what I did all those years, so what makes you think I’m going to care now?’ Let him go back to drinking for all I care.”
Although many counselors believe that the emotional turmoil expressed by these children is often fear in disguise, there are many instances in which fear is easy to see.
Ten-year-old Nicholas Lewis, for example, said he still remembers coming home at night to an empty house and huddling with his brother in the dark when they thought a burglar--later discovered to be their pet hamster--was upstairs in their bedroom.
The memories of wondering where their mother was and whether she would be coming home didn’t disappear automatically just because she told them she had stopped drinking.
“I was always scared that I would do something to make her mad or upset and that she’d start drinking again,” Nicholas said. “I wouldn’t show her my homework or tell her stuff because I didn’t want that to happen.”
One reason for such a fear, therapists say, is that children often feel directly or indirectly responsible for a parent’s drinking or drug abuse--a belief many alcoholic or addicted parents have done nothing to discourage.
“It’s not uncommon for a parent to say to a child, ‘I wouldn’t drink so much if you wouldn’t bother me,’ or, ‘Don’t make your dad mad or he’ll start drinking,’ ” said Chantal Cohen, a caseworker at Cri-Help, a long-term residential drug treatment facility in North Hollywood.
Holiday Hot Line
When a parent starts to recover, however, a child may feel responsible for maintaining the sobriety. “Last year, we set up a holiday hot line for kids to call about their parents’ drinking or recovery. More than 40% of those calls were from kids who thought something they might do would make their parents drink again,” Moe said.
When the children were told that the only way they could do that was to force a bottle to their parents’ lips, Moe said the children “laughed with a tremendous sense of relief. They didn’t know that they never made the parent drink in the first place, and that there was nothing they could do to stop it from starting again.”
Unfortunately, the information and support children need to cope with the aftermath of their parents’ problems is often too little or too late. “Adult children of alcoholics have gotten a lot of attention in recent years, but young children have gotten completely left out of the recovery continuum,” said Gerry Myers, executive director of the National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics (NACoA) in South Laguna. “The family has been in this crazy situation for so long, and then the parents enter a recovery program and the attitude by everyone is that everything from then on will be fine. That’s not always the case.”
Myers blames a lack of awareness and a lack of programs to address children’s needs. “I’d say there are probably a dozen programs nationwide that are both affordable and qualified to help these kids,” he said. “In many cases, the parent has to be in a hospital-based recovery center for the child to participate.”
Although some cities offer free “Alatot” meetings--support groups for young children affiliated with Alanon, the 12-step program for families and friends of alcoholics--counselors complain that they are not widespread and that they exclude the children of drug-addicted parents.
A volunteer at Alanon’s central office in Los Angeles said that parents who are members of Alcoholics Anonymous regularly call the office to find out about groups for their younger children, but are referred to private therapists.
Even though the emotional adjustment is difficult for the children, the now-sober parents say the rocky road to recovery is worthwhile.
“They didn’t come near me when I was using. They were scared of me,” said Oscar Guzman, a recovering heroin addict and a father of seven. “Now they hug me and kiss me when I come home.”
Another father, describing an incident that could only fall into the kids-will-be-kids category, said he realized how much his sobriety meant to his 5-year-old daughter when he went to pick her up at her preschool.
“She came running up to me and in this breathless little voice said, ‘Guess what! All the daddies get to come to school and tell us what they do!’ ” he said. The little girl then turned to her teacher and said very proudly, “My daddy is an alcoholic but he doesn’t drink.”
The father chuckled at the memory.
“I just smiled at the teacher,” he said. “Under the circumstances, it seemed like the only logical thing to do.”
WHERE TO GET HELP FOR CHILDREN OF RECOVERING ALCOHOLICS AND ADDICTS Meetings Alanon Family Services Group offers free meetings in Los Angeles County for children ages 8 and older. There are also Alateen meetings for teen-agers. For more information, call Alanon at 387-3158 or (818) 994-6855. Nar-Anon, the organization for families and friends of narcotics abusers, has support groups for children ages 12 through 18. There are no groups for younger children but advice is available. For information, call 547-5800 or write Nar-Anon Family Groups, P.O. Box 2562, Palos Verdes, Calif. 90274. Books “Alateen: Hope for Children of Alcoholics,” written by children, is available at some libraries and at Alanon’s central office. Also at Alanon is a booklet called “What’s Drunk, Mama?” which parents can read aloud to children.