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Every year, the government spends billions of dollars on the war on drugs. Yet, in millions of homes across the country, that battle made even more difficult because half of all kids in America live with an adult who uses drugs.
One such household was George Evans’ home.
He used to skip school for days, even weeks at a time, mostly because of his mother. “I was afraid when I’d go to school, she’d get drunk and hurt herself, or get behind the wheel, or crash into somebody,” George remembers.
Between Kindergarten and the eighth grade, George missed over four hundred days of school. But as Steve Harris, licensed clinical social worker, explains, “It’s an extreme case in the degree to which it’s happening, missing 400 days of school, it’s common in the sense of the role reversal.”
George’s mom, Starlet agrees, “Your child feels that they have to be there to watch you.”
In fact, according to a study by Columbia University, half of all children in the U.S. live with an adult who uses tobacco, drinks heavily, or uses illegal substances.
And experts say that instability can be harmful to kids.
“Effects such as conduct disorders, higher rates of anxiety or depression, certainly a higher rate of problems in school, behavior problems,” and Harris says, a higher rate of addiction among those children.
“If it’s the parent who’s using the substance, then the child is at a greater likelihood for substance abuse, genetically as well as environmentally,” he explains.
And, he says, too often parents don’t view nicotine as a serious addiction and forget how tobacco can harm their kids in one other way, “It seems minor in terms of the social acceptance of it, but I’ve also worked with a lot of people whose parents have died of lung cancer. And that’s a pretty profound effect on anybody’s life.”
With a lot of help, George’s mom is no longer drinking, and George is back in school. “It makes my job a little easier to go to school,” says George, “we both kind of needed that stability.”
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