ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews theory and evidence on the effects of parental substance use disorder on parenting. It discusses central issues and definitional complexities in studying parents with substance use disorder and provides historical considerations. The chapter describes methodological complexities, explains the roles of multiple risk factors that are correlated with parental substance use disorder and may either be confounders or mediators in the relation between parent substance use disorder and parenting. It reviews parenting interventions for substance-abusing parents. Numerous attachment-based parenting interventions have been developed for, and evaluated in, populations of substance-abusing parents. Studies of parent-child interactions use one of the oldest forms of inquiry to understand the nature of exchanges between parents with a substance use disorder and their children—that is, direct observation. The combination of high levels of parent substance use and permissiveness may be particularly problematic in terms of risk for the next generation.
