A Study on the Quality of Parental-Child Relationship in Addicted Adolescents versus Normal Ones

Because of the high number of Iranian adolescents that abuse substances and the severity of related consequences, adolescent substance abuse has become an important issue for Iranian families. An initial step toward understanding drug addiction is to recognize addiction as a problem that requires commitment to lifelong recovery efforts on the part of the individual and the family.The phenomenon of substance abuse among adolescents gradually becomes more common in every day life. Addiction to mood altering substances, irrespective of the addict’s age, is a phenomenon powerful enough to destroy the sufferers and their families. Addiction is a disease that not only affect the addicts, but also their families. It is common knowledge that when treating or rehabilitating a chemical dependent person, efforts will most likely be futile when the person has no support system.The researcher noted that the success of rehabilitation of drug dependant adolescents is greatly influenced by the support and involvement of their families. The researcher also noted that the mothers of these adolescents seldom hesitated to be involved and on the contrary tended to be over involved with their children. Just the opposite appears to be true for the fathers of the adolescents.Although they attend parent meetings and other required events throughout treatment, they often seem to lack emotional involvement. With closer investigation it appeared that this was the “normal” pattern of functioning for these families. Lack of emotional involvement by fathers led the researcher to certain questions about such families, for instance “Did the adolescent turn to mood altering substances because of insufficient emotional involvement by his/her father, or did the father become emotionally distant after addiction had already set in?” and “What causes a father to be emotionally distant when his child suffers from addiction and needs emotional support and involvement from both parents?”. These questions motivated the researcher to research the phenomenon. Subsequently the following question was formulated as a research question: “What is the quality of parental-child relationship in addicted adolescents versus normal ones?"The other hypotheses are as follow:- There are differences between the quality of father-child relationship in addicted adolescents versus normal ones in all aspects of relation.- There are differences between the quality of mother-child relationship in addicted adolescents versus normal ones in all aspects of relation.- There arent any differences between the quality of fatherly and motherly relationship in normal adolescents. - There arent any differences between the quality of fatherly and motherly relationship in addicted adolescents.The purpose of this study is to find an answer to above questions. Subjects are young adults referring to drug quitting centers in Tehran from which 30 have been chosen. Talking to them to be satisfied, they were asked to fill questionnaires. 30 normal students from junior high school level have been chosen concerning matching conditions. For gathering data Parental-Child Questionnaires were used.Findings & Results showed that the quality of parental-child relationship in adolescents of normal families in all aspects is better than addicted ones also the fatherly-child relationship in normal group is better than the latter ones; and it is the same for motherly-child relationship except in role confusion subscales. There was not any significant difference between fatherly and motherly relationship in normal families but among addicted children motherly relationship was somehow better.