Question
I’m in recovery from an addiction that started when I was a kid. My wife and I have three young sons and I don’t want them leaving my house with any kind of addiction like I did. I know I can’t control what they do with their lives, but are there things we can do in our home to make it less likely that they’ll have addictions?
Answer
Your sons are fortunate to have parents who ask these kinds of questions. Preventing and healing addictions requires tremendous intentionality from everyone involved. And, you’re correct that even though we can’t control what our children choose to do with their lives, we can create conditions and build relationships with them that will set them up for positive outcomes and offer support throughout their mortal journey.
Before we discuss prevention, please recognize that if your child ever goes down the road of addiction, it’s not an automatic sign that you are a failure as a parent. It’s true that parents have a significant influence on their children’s lives, but there are hundreds of decisions leading toward addiction that are the sole responsibility of the individual with the addiction. If this weren’t the case, then those who struggle with addiction would never have hope of using their own agency to break free. As parents, we have to hold fast to Joseph Smith’s important leadership principle of teaching our children correct principles and, ultimately, allowing them to govern themselves.[i]
When considering addiction prevention, it’s important to recognize what purpose addictions serve in people’s lives. Addictions are counterfeit attachments that help us regulate our bodies, emotions, and relationships.[ii] They target the regulatory systems in our brains and bodies to numb, enhance, or diminish reality. In my experience, individuals who struggle with addictions aren’t lacking willpower, but are mismanaging their ability to regulate their emotions, relationships, and thoughts.
When we’re born, we don’t have the ability to self-regulate our bodies and emotions very effectively. We count on our caregivers to touch us, speak to us, feed us, clothe us, and offer us safety and comfort. These things regulate our bodies so we can sleep, feel calm, and securely experience the full range of emotions available to us. As we get older, we’re expected to self-regulate without the constant support of other people.
Even though we all require some degree of co-regulation from others, healthy adults know how to manage the balance of self-regulation and co-regulation. However, managing emotions, physical bodies, thoughts, and relationships isn’t always easy and counterfeits can show up and lure us into harmful patterns of unhealthy dependency on behaviors, substances, and relationships. These counterfeits show up as food, drugs, screens, sex, money, perfectionism, work, and so on.
Even though addictions are complex and caused by multiple factors, here are two things you can begin doing in your home to help your children develop the ability to regulate their emotions and bodies in healthy ways: 1) teaching them how to self-regulate and, 2) allowing them to co-regulate with healthy relationships. I’ll explain each of these in more detail.
First, you can teach your sons to manage their uncomfortable emotions in healthy ways. You can teach them that all emotions are important and shouldn’t be dismissed, especially the uncomfortable ones. They can learn to slow down, breathe, and trust that their emotions won’t overtake them. There are countless daily opportunities to teach our children to tolerate the distressing emotions we all experience as part of life.
Here are some common ways we let our children avoid painful emotions:
- When a child is sad, we give them food (usually something sugary).
- We might try and quickly fix any disappointments they experience.
- We sometimes over-coordinate with other adults to make sure our child doesn’t have to be uncomfortable (i.e., making sure they sit by a friend, make sure they have the perfect teacher, etc.).
- We jump in and resolve their arguments with their siblings.
- We solve their problems for them.
- We do their homework for them.
Instead, consider the following alternative reactions to help children learn how to sit with and tolerate distress:
- When a child is sad, we allow them to tell us what’s on their mind and listen to them.
- When a child experiences a disappointment, we acknowledge the disappointment, express compassion, and allow them to eventually accept the difficult emotions.
- We allow our children to enter new and unfamiliar situations and expect them to handle the uncertainty and vulnerability that comes with new people, new rules, new environments, and other unknowns.
- We expect our children to spend time working out their differences with their siblings in a respectful way.
- We ask good questions and allow our children to find solutions to their problems.
- We allow them to do their own schoolwork and accept any consequences for poor work, late assignments, or missed assignments.
When children feel trusted by loving caretakers to handle difficult emotions, they develop a strong inner-confidence that they can do hard things and don’t require immediate relief from pain. You can allow your children to feel the natural pain that comes from making mistakes and learning from them. Our job isn’t to protect our children from making mistakes. Our job is to help our children manage their emotions, bodies, and relationships when they make mistakes so they can grow into healthy functioning adults.
Second, you can model healthy co-regulation by allowing your children to depend on you for emotional support. The examples for healthy self-regulation I listed above all include an element of co-regulation with a parent. Co-regulation isn’t the same as fixing things for our kids or rescuing them from their emotions. Instead, it’s staying with them through the difficult emotions. You want your children to learn that they are stronger when they are connected to others.
We have countless examples of our loving Father in Heaven and Savior inviting us to come to them and receive strength. We sing hymns like, “I Need Thee Every Hour”[iii] and read reassuring scriptures like, “Fear thou not, for I am with thee.”[iv] Even though we are capable of self-regulating, we simply do better in the strength of the Lord. Our children can learn how to turn to God and to others for strength and support.
This is why regular family dinners, one-on-one time with each child, safe physical touch, compassionate listening, and other healthy relationship behaviors are so important…these soothe our inborn need to co-regulate with others.
When you make it clear to your children that they can talk with you about anything and you regularly show interest in their lives by asking good questions and making time for them, they’re more likely to turn to you and others for support. They’ll also have more strength when they’re alone to self-regulate strong emotions. And, when your children make mistakes and mismanage their emotions, bodies, and relationships, they will feel your support as you help them learn from these mistakes, feel the weight of their actions, and move toward healthier behaviors with the loving support from their parents.
It’s common for parents to get polarized between requiring their kids to figure things out on their own or stepping in and doing everything for them so they don’t to suffer. Both of these extremes fail to set our kids up to understand themselves and tolerate distressing emotions. Instead, we want them to have the ability to self-regulate and then know how to reach out and accept support from others. When these two are balanced correctly, we do much better regulating our emotions and protecting ourselves from the lure of addictions.
You have a wonderful opportunity to create an environment where you allow your children to experience the full range of highs and lows of life with the intentional and loving presence of their parents. This combination will reduce the need for counterfeit attachments that would temporarily offer relief but rob them of the joy and comfort that comes from knowing they can manage themselves and turn to meaningful relationships with God and others.
Geoff will answer a new family and relationship question every Friday. You can email your question to him at ge***@lo************.com
If you’ve broken trust with your spouse and want a structured approach to repairing the damage you’ve created, I’ve created the Trust Building Bootcamp, a 12-week online program designed to help you restore trust and become a trustworthy person. You can receive 20% off by entering the code MERIDIAN at checkout. Visit www.trustbuildingacademy.com to learn more and enroll in the course.
About the Author
Geoff Steurer is a licensed marriage and family therapist in St. George, Utah. He specializes in working with couples, pornography/sexual addiction, betrayal trauma, and infidelity. He is the founder of LifeStar of St. George, Utah (www.lifestarstgeorge.com) and Alliant Counseling and Education (www.alliantcounseling.com). Geoff is the co-author of “Love You, Hate the Porn: Healing a Relationship Damaged by Virtual Infidelity”, the host of the Illuminate podcast, and creates online relationship courses available at www.trustbuildingacademy.com. He earned degrees from Brigham Young University and Auburn University. He is married to Jody Young Steurer and they are the parents of four children.
You can connect with him at:
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Website: www.geoffsteurer.com
Twitter: @geoffsteurer
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[i] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teachings-joseph-smith/chapter-24?lang=eng
[ii] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-18091-000
[iii] “I Need Thee Every Hour” – Hymn 98
[iv] Isaiah 41:10
Thelma RamosJanuary 26, 2020
Setting a good example to our children is what I know has worked for our family. I am also a recovering addict and LDS.
Mark ChamberlainJanuary 26, 2020
What helpful insights! As a psychologist I work regularly with people struggling to overcome addictive behaviors. It's so liberating when they learn, as Geoff suggests, to regulate their nervous systems by paying attention to their emotions and reaching out when they're in need. Rather than beating themselves up when they struggle, we want our kids to view themselves with compassion so they can work in a patient and determined way to improve themselves. That's how we grow best as adults, too, and the way we grapple with our own struggles may be teaching our children more powerfully than anything we say to them. Thank you Meridian Magazine for sharing articles on such important topics.