Tips for Parents With Children in Recovery

Take Care of Yourself

Often, parents are deeply affected by their child’s addiction and experience emotional, mental and physical illnesses. Therefore, your health and well being must be your top priority of all tips for parents. You cannot help and support your child if your state of mind and physical health are lacking.

Educate Yourself

Addiction is a disease. The more you know about it, the more equipped you are to help your child recover as with any disease. The Internet has an abundance of material available for parents to read. There are several suggested readings for parents below and additional online resources here. Equally important, get involved in the recovery community in your area.

Set Guidelines and Stick With Them

An addicted child needs very clear guidelines and our primary job must be to enforce these. Follow through on any consequences you agree to. Clearly they become very proficient at manipulating within any grey area. As well as, using deceitful tactics and employing bullying when parents are not consistent with their boundaries.

Encourage and Support Recovery

Enabling is spoken about in all support meetings. Consequently, as parents we have to encourage recovery and ONLY assist our addicted child when it leads to their recovery. This includes assistance financially, emotionally and with their daily livelihood. This is a key tip for parents.

• Addict in the House, Robin Barnett & Darren Kavinoky
• Beautiful Boy, David Sheff
• Boundaries, Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend
• Codependent No More, Melody Beattie
• Don’t Let Your Kids Kill You, Charles Rubin
• Heroin, Hurricane Katrina and the Howling Within, Eliza Player
• How to Stop Time, Ann Marlowe
• Parched, Heather King
• Parent Through Addiction, Ginny Mills
• Son Down, Son Up, Brenda Seals
• Tending Dandelions, Hazelden
• The Jagged Series, Lorelie Rozanno
• The Joey Song, Sandy Swenson