Substance-Abusing Mothers

This article by Y-I Hser, E Evans, L Li, A Metchik-Gaddis and N Messina is concerned with the affects of substance abuse on mothers, but not in prenatal development.  Instead, this article focuses on the emotional and behavioral effects that a substance abusing mother has on a child.  The mothers in this study, who admitted to be substance users, were followed for ten years in an attempt to see how their children were affected.  The article states that previous research indicates that parental substance abuse is associated with a threefold increase in risk of maltreatment and a twofold increase in the chances of physical or sexual abuse of children.  Previous research also acknowledged racial differences which manifested themselves in socioeconomic and cultural differences.  The article clearly lays out the researchers methods for collecting their data and results.  Some of these results were that children of these substance abusing mothers are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems and that girls and boys were equally affected in this study.  Interestingly, the severity of the mothers’ drug or alcohol abuse were not related to their children’s scores on the Child Behavior Checklist which was used to gauge the amount of emotional or behavioral problems these children were likely to have or were already exhibiting.  After stating all of the results, this article posits a question for later research: “are there racial and ethnic factors that contribute to negative or positive behavioral outcomes in children of substance users?” and states its strengths and its limitations.