By Teon Hayes

The thread between parent and child should be one of love and stability. But too often, substance use tears at that thread until it frays. Sometimes the fraying goes beyond repair, leaving behind wounds and loss that no one can fix.

This crisis hits home for me. The generational cycle of addiction shaped my life. While I managed to find a path forward, it wasn’t because there was a system of resources and support in place. I survived — but I can’t say the same for people I love, or for countless others across this country.

Recovery Is About Families, Not Just Individuals

When we talk about substance use, we often focus on the individual — their journey, their choices, and their healing. But for mothers, recovery goes far beyond just them. Substance use impacts the entire family. A mother’s journey to recovery is deeply tied to her children, her family, and her community. Without recovery support, trauma seeps between generations like water through cracked foundations, weakening structures that might have otherwise held strong.

Consider two families.

In one, a mother seeks help. She is ready to recover, but does not have access to programming that allows her to stay with her children. There are waitlists. She’s told that programs in her community have been cut back due to lack of funding. Defeated, she tries to hold her family together while struggling alone. Her son grows up carrying the weight of his mother’s pain, internalizing the instability, the stigma, and the silence that follows substance use. Years later, the son turns to substances to cope — and he doesn’t survive his battle. His death represents the loss of a brilliant young man who never got the chance to graduate, walk down the aisle, or become a father — he never had the opportunity to truly thrive. He was one of more than 80,000 people who lost their lives to drug overdoses in 2024.

In another family, a mother enters a treatment program that allows her to keep custody of her children. For the first time, she feels supported rather than punished. She receives counseling, housing support, and guidance from other mothers who’ve walked a similar path. Her children are also welcomed into the process, given therapy and space to process their emotions instead of silently carrying them. Together, the family begins to heal and learns how to overcome the trauma that fueled generations of substance use and pain. By the time the mother completes her program, the family has grown stronger, closer, and more resilient — living proof of what’s possible when recovery embraces the whole family.

The Ripple Effect of Losing Support

In 2023, approximately 19 million children in the United States lived with a parent or primary caregiver struggling with substance use; that’s roughly one in four children. Even more heartbreaking, a child growing up in a home with substance use is eight times more likely to develop an addiction than a child who is growing up in a home free of addiction. This highlights a clear intergenerational cycle of addiction, showing how the cycle repeats when families don’t get the support they need.

When a mother or other caregiver in recovery can’t get the help they need — whether that’s counseling, child care during treatment, peer mentorship, or safe housing — the impact doesn’t stop with them. The consequences ripple outward, shaping the lives of their children and even future generations. For children, this often looks like persistent anxiety or depression, behavioral disruptions or trouble in school, and deep feelings of neglect or abandonment. The effects can linger for years, shaping mental health, relationships, and opportunities well into adulthood.

Children whose mothers lack access to recovery support are more likely to experience housing instability, food insecurity, and trauma. These early hardships not only cause immediate harm but also set the stage for poor health, educational setbacks, and cycles of poverty that are incredibly difficult to break. This is why recovery support must extend beyond the parent — it must embrace the entire family.

The Disproportionate Harm to Black Families

For Black mothers, the stakes are even higher. The child welfare system disproportionately targets Black families, often under the guise of “protection,” but too often mirroring tactics rooted in slavery: separating children from their mothers, weakening family bonds, and undermining the stability of Black households.

Enslaved Black women were denied the right to raise their own children, a deliberate act to dismantle family structures and maintain control. When a Black mother faces substance use challenges, the system is more likely to remove her children rather than provide the support she needs to recover while keeping her family intact. Black children are two to three times more likely to be separated from their families than white children.

This was my own reality. And to make matters worse, after separating families, the system does very little to follow up with the child or parent to ensure their needs are met, their mental health is cared for, and they are not left carrying invisible wounds for years to come.

Policy decisions must be made with care, recognizing their impact not only on individuals but on children, extended families, and entire communities. The conditions we see today in many Black and brown neighborhoods — violence, police surveillance, poor health outcomes, inadequate housing, and limited opportunities — are not the result of individual failings. They are the predictable outcomes of intentional policies and decades of disinvestment. Ending dedicated funding for substance use programs would only intensify these harms, stripping away one of the few pathways to healing and family stability.

What Recovery for Mothers Should Look Like

To create real change, we must invest in a system of care that truly supports recovery and breaks intergenerational cycles of addiction. This means funding and expanding:

• Comprehensive, family-centered treatment that allows women to heal without losing custody of their children.
• Safe, stable housing that is affordable and located near treatment and support services.
• Access to child care during treatment and recovery programs, so mothers don’t have to choose between healing and caregiving.
• Peer recovery support led by women with lived experience, who can provide guidance and empathy and reduce stigma.
• Culturally responsive care and professionals who address racial inequities and center the needs of Black women and families.
• Targeted support for children and youth, ensuring they learn healthy coping mechanisms, build resilience, and receive opportunities to heal as they navigate the impacts of substance use in their families.
• Family therapy for parents, children, and extended relatives, designed to strengthen relationships, repair trust, and end intergenerational cycles of addiction.
• Research and policy solutions that explicitly connect substance use to mental health and trauma, with a focus on historical and generational trauma as a driver of substance misuse. This includes building a workforce of professionals trained to explore, address, and heal trauma at its core.

The Path Forward

We cannot afford to go backward. Too many lives are on the line. That’s why it’s essential to protect and strengthen funding dedicated to substance use prevention, treatment, and long-term recovery support and services. These resources ensure that people — especially those without insurance — can access treatment, prevention programs, and recovery support. Disrupting these funding streams would be devastating not only to mothers but also to the generations connected to them.

Dedicated and stable funding for treatment, prevention, and recovery services doesn’t just support individuals in recovery, it also creates a lifeline for their children. It ensures families can stay together, heal together, and rebuild together. Without that funding, too many families are left trapped in cycles of trauma, loss, and grief. Ending funding support for substance use deepens racial inequities, perpetuates historical harms, and robs future generations of stability and opportunity.

Instead, we should be expanding investments in family-based recovery models and holding systems accountable for keeping families together. The two families introduced in the beginning stories run parallel, but the outcomes couldn’t be more different. The difference wasn’t the mother’s choices or love — it was access. One family met closed doors while the other found open arms.

Recovery is not just about surviving substance use. For mothers and those they love, it’s about building a future where healing is possible, families are whole, and every generation has the chance to thrive.

For me, this truth carries the weight of my brother, David. He was the son who never got the chance to thrive. His absence is a constant reminder of what’s at stake — the fragile threads that hold families together, and how every policy decision and funding choice determines whether those threads hold or unravel. My heart goes out to every frayed thread that has ended in loss due to substance use. This grief and absence ripple through families, felt for generations to come — a smile no longer there, a presence no longer felt.

The fight for healing and wholeness for families navigating substance use must continue.

Dedicated to “Lil David.” May you rest in eternal peace.