I was in a bit of a tiff on a lesser part of the interwebs about poor people on drugs.
As I was defending my point, I was quite stuck by this person’s contention that anyone (any poor one) who fails a drug screen ought to have their children taken away.
**Can anyone think of a successful child of drug addicted parents? **
Almost an idle question, but gosh you would figure there have to be some examples.
Define “successful”. I’ve known plenty of people who are productive middle-class members of society who have alcoholic or junkie parents. Hell, my grandpa on my dad’s side was a drunk and a beater who’d spend all the family’s money on beer instead of food, and most of my aunts and uncles are very successful. If you mean celebrities I can’t think of any offhand.
Well, I guess it would depend on how you define success, but I understand that the son of Javi’s wife (the kid may or may not be Javi’s biological child, having been conceived when they were squatting with other equally-addicted folk) is of college age and in college now. He hasn’t had time for much more success than that. The wife died of AIDS: both Javi and the boy are neg; the pregnancy was his parents’ “wakeup call” and he did not have drug-related problems in infancy.
We have quite a few children of alcoholic parents in the boards.
Does my mother’s addiction to prescription drugs count? It didn’t last long and I was in my teens when it happened. Ah, I guess it doesn’t… Dad was unemployed at the time, but we probably would still have counted as middle-class.
Bihjou Phillips parents were not only drug addicts, but totally fucked up. When her mother went into premature labor, they didn’t call the ambulance until they hid all the drug stuff in their house! It is amazing that she survived at all.
Where are these children supposed to go? Are Brad and Angelina supposed to take them all in? Or maybe rich, non-drug users are supposed to take their pick and then we throw the rejects back into, what, foster care?
If you count prescription drugs then there must be dozens of examples celebrities and their children, some of whom must have been successful.
My best friend in high school came from a family of chronically unemployed alcoholics and he is very successful in life. Some of the other kids in the family went on to be useless, some are middle class which I would call successful under the circumstances. That tells me that people make their own success and our system, full of faults as it is, works pretty damned well.
My mom was a junkie. I am not. I call that a success story. Does the story have to be about “famous” people to count?
Drew Barrymore turned her life around.
The daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love seems to have turned out stable enough at least to have avoided any public meltdown so far.
Watch ESPN in the run up to the Superbowl. This is the favorite personal interest story they run every single year.
On the “possibly other side of the fence” you have Dave Thomas and some others. I don’t know if anyone knows why his parents gave him up for adoption. Considering the year it could have been as simple as an unplanned conception but you really can’t rule our drugs.
I read a thread about Medium yesterday and read the entry for Jake Weber…
Good on ya, Dogzilla! Was it difficult to stay away from drugs, or was it obvious to stay away?
The notion that parental drug addiction increases a child’s chance of problems is easy to support. The idea that such children have no chance of success in life is obvious nonsense.
It was obvious and easy. I saw “the needle and the damage done” up close and at a very young age. To this day, I have never tried anything harder than weed or booze. I’ve been offered coke so many times and have never even been tempted to try it. Not even once. So not interested.
Also, I cannot stand to watch that show Intervention. Sorry, I lived it, no need to re-experience all that shit vicariously.
The difficulty of being raised by an addict or addicts, is not the temptation to abuse alcohol and drugs yourself, but not being given appropriate tools to cope with life as an adult. I really had to figure myself out from scratch and figure out how the world works and my place in it with very little to no guidance at all from my parents. For example, I learned how to balance a checkbook from my first college roommate. I learned how to write a resume and find a professional job pretty much the hard way, through experience.
There’s some trust and relationship issues, but those have not affected my professional life or my “success,” however you define that. Staying away from drugs has been the least of my concerns.
Liz Murray was homeless and bumming change on the streets of New York, due to a host of factors, most of which were related to her parents’ drug addictions.
She went to Harvard on a full ride scholarship and is now a motivational speaker.
Sure. Back when I worked in drug rehab I met dozens of them. Unfortunately, medical confidentiality laws in the US limit how much I can say about them.
I think the most memorable example was a woman I’ll call “H” (not her real initial) who was an illiterate woman in her mid 40’s when I knew her, made a living as a cheap hooker, not very bright (sort of Forrest Gump without the pleasant personality) who’s five adult children had not only graduated high school and gone on to college but were successful adults in the community. If I recall, she produced a lawyer, nurse, plumber, school teacher, and I can’t remember what the fifth one did for a living.
Of course, none of that is particularly flashy or noticed by the media, and given the social stigma attached to having a junkie whore for a mother none of them normally let others know about their mother and their origins (none of them knew who their fathers were, other than they were certainly among their mother’s numerous customers). Nonetheless, H somehow got the notion into her head that she didn’t want the same life for her kids and education was their ticket out. Arguably one of the few sensible and intelligent things the woman did in her life. Whatever her other faults, though, she did know how to raise successful children. And none of her kids had a drug problem, either, so far as I know.
Usually, though, there wasn’t such a divide between parent(s) and child. The children of middle and upper class college degreed drug addicts were far more likely to do well in life. The greater the poverty the more obstacles to the kids though as H shows even a pretty wretched person might turn out to be a decent parent. Not always, but it does happen.
The thing is, though, that most successful products of drug addicts aren’t given to advertising that fact. So you might have met a few in your life and not known about it. Children of alcoholics are much more likely to open up about such family demons, children of other sorts of addicts not so much.
Thank you all, as I said, sort of an idle question.
It depends on how you define success but there are tons of successful alcoholics and addicts out there, even some practicing ones. Go to an AA or an NA meeting in a upper-middle class area and you can meet all you want in one place at one time. Some are recovering and doing as well as ever but being an alcoholic or an addict is only an additional hurdle and not a complete barrier to many types of success. Their kids will have additional challenges from it but there is no reason to think that many of them won’t make it even if they follow the same early pattern as a parent.
This is a pretty bizarre question. I don’t think the OP has any idea of the scope of the sheer numbers of alcoholics and drug addicts that are out there. They certainly aren’t all on skid row or end up on COPS. Many make a lot of money and manage to be decent parents even if the situation isn’t ideal. There are even some on this board. Lots of them recover from it and do even better.
I don’t even know what it means to have your kids taken away for failing a drug screen. Does that mean testing positive for marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, or heroin? Even if you had a zero tolerance policy in place for that sort of thing, the rate of false positives alone doesn’t make that a workable idea from a legal or practical standpoint without other evidence that they are a negligent parent overall.
I am not advocating being an alcoholic or a drug addict if you have children. It isn’t a good mix but it isn’t as clear-cut as testing positive once for an illegal substance or getting a DUI without your kids in the car either.
Bill Clinton was raised by his alcoholic step dad, and seems to have done alright for himself. Granted drug screens don’t check for booze.