Substance abuse among adolescents continues to be a serious condition that affects their growth, learning and relationships with their parents. This article discusses the effects of substance abuse on parents who are raising adolescents abusing substances. It is based on a study that sought an in-depth understanding of the experiences, challenges and coping strategies of parents raising adolescents abusing substances in the community of Ramotse in Hammanskraal, Gauteng. A qualitative research approach with purposive and snowball sampling was abused. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed abusing Tesch's eight steps. Guba's model was applied for data verification. The findings reflect the challenges that parents face and the article offers suggestions for social work policy and practice to deal with substance abuse. Ethical issues were also taken into consideration.
Adolescents strive for freedom and autonomy; thus, communication with their parents needs to be enhanced. Building solid healthy relationships at this stage of their lives is of utmost importance to help them cope with the changes and challenges they are experiencing. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the parent-adolescent relationship in the substance dependency field. The focus is on the relationship between parents and their adolescents who have a substance use disorder. Parenting adolescents poses its own set of challenges, making it difficult to build and maintain healthy parent-adolescent relationships. We argue that although adolescent substance use disorder has been extensively researched, the relationship between parents and adolescents with substance use disorder has surprisingly not received the same attention. It is this gap that this chapter seeks to address. With this in mind, the ecological systems theory was employed here to shed light on the importance and significance of developing healthy parent-adolescent relationships. The findings show that the parent-adolescent relationship primarily informs the daily living of both the parents and the adolescents. The parent-adolescent relationship is therefore very important as it represents whole-family functioning.
Background: Nyaope is a South African substance whose usage continues to escalate among young people. Regrettably, the negative effects of this scourge impact not only the misusers but also their parents who unavoidably have to endure the problems associated with their adolescents’ dependence.Aim: The study sought to explore the experiences and coping strategies of parents living with adolescents who misuse nyaope.Setting: The study was undertaken in Soshanguve township, situated in the north of the city of Tshwane in the Gauteng province of South Africa.Methods: Using a qualitative approach, the study adopted dimensions of both explorative and descriptive designs to develop an in-depth understanding of experiences and coping strategies of parents living with adolescents who misuse nyaope in Soshanguve Township. Individual face-to-face semistructured interviews through purposive sampling were conducted by the researchers to collect data from eight parents of such adolescents.Results: Three themes emerged, namely parents’ experiences of how they detected the onset of the adolescents’ misuse of nyaope, effects of adolescents’ misuse of nyaope on parents and family as a whole and parents’ coping strategies in dealing with the adolescents.Conclusion: From the shared stories, it is evident that parents are overly concerned about the extent of damage cause by adolescents’ misuse of nyaope within the family system.Contribution: This study will enable scholars in the field of substance misuse to conduct further research on the phenomenon and generate new knowledge that will contribute towards formulating future policies and implementing new intervention strategies.
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