Did you know that more than 8 million children in the United States have at least one parent who abuses drugs? Sadly, it's true. In this article, it is based off how drug abuse on parents leads to child neglect. There are existing treatment studies that have been partial to case examinations. Therefore, therapy has been evaluated in parents that would commit child neglect and drug abuse. Abusing drugs is not just only a problem but it also becomes more of a problem with families and that's how child neglect starts to occur. Parents who abuse any drugs and alcohol, are more likely to end up raising their children wrong, have divorces, and are unemployed or get fired from their jobs. Therefore, they don't realize all the damage they're doing to their children. .
Children who have parents that don't consume drugs, don't experience child neglect as much as children who do consume them, and end up experiencing parental behavior such as neglect as I've mentioned, they are unsupervised, are exposed to danger and in most cases, end up going to foster homes for a while. Drug abuse is one of the most common causes that influence child maltreatment. The authors in this article, cite a statistic that showed that approximately 50 to 70 percent of maltreatment children estimated to have parents who abused drugs. Brown and Homan (2006) found that parents who abused drugs, wouldn't change their children's diapers, had a dirty home, and had no food or food formula for their children. As a result, Thirty Eight percent of children with parents who were found to abuse cocaine, experienced child maltreatment in their first year of life. (Wassermann and Leventhal, 1993). Authors in the article mentioned that Sowder and Burt (1980) found 42 percent of children born from parents that abused heroin, suffered from mental retardation and severe emotional problems. Authors also mentioned that marijuana use in parents may be less harmful than other types of drugs but that not only because Marijuana isn't that harmful, it didn't mean that poor supervision and bad health consequences due to marijuana exposure haven't been found in children, because it has.
