ABSTRACT
Advances in our understanding of addictive behaviors and of parenting can help us identify substance-specific psychoactive effects that likely create variable risk for parental abuse and neglect of a child. This chapter addresses a current gap in the literature by connecting these two bodies of literature to hypothesize how specific psychoactive substances directly affect parenting mechanisms in distinct ways. We also discuss how this information can be applied to current social work screening, prevention, and intervention practices and its implications for future research aiming to integrate biological, social, and environmental mechanism that mitigate substance-related child abuse and neglect.
