Drug-Addicted Single Mothers

The losses in quality of life for addicted mothers and their children are profound. The mothers are not able to develop themselves, explore their potential, and become full participating members of society because they are constricted by their addictions and economically burdened by trying to raise children, when they are possibly emotionally and psychologically unable to do so. The mothers feel like personal and societal failures, and the children suffer.

Economically, the ramifications of this rippling cycle are rather large. Many of the mothers are unable to work because they are raising children, going to school, or succumbing to their addictions. These young women become burdens to society and their families, and often it is the taxpayers who end up underwriting the costs. The children of addicted mothers are the innocent victims who may carry the effects into the next generation. They do not have adequate parenting, education, or even basic health and economic support. These are innocent children who suffer with learning and emotional disabilities. They struggle in school and have behavioral challenges. These children are more inclined to have the genetic and environmental components that lead to addiction, and they are more likely to drop out of school, participate in gangs, have difficulty with significant relationships

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lead to gang participation. Unfortunately, many of the factors that lead to gang participation are the same qualities present in the addicted homeùdysfunctional relationships, birth complications, poor health, and violence in the home. Poverty in the home, lack of supervision, poor emotional support for the child, and lack of role models in the home, factors present in addicted households, are similar to the reasons that young boys join gangs (Interagency task, p.1). If economics are low in the home, which they may be in a single mother household, the youth find that they can earn money by selling drugs to others, perpetuating the cycle into another generation, and even further, if a young female gang member becomes pregnant from gang associations. During the Clinton administration, there was a push to reduce welfare participation and all the societal problems that accompany generational dependence on welfare, including unwed mothers and substance abuse. By the 1980s, this country started feeling a "rising anxiety about the dependent and self-destructive behavior of the poorùbe it school drop-out rates, teen pregnancy, nonwork, or drug addiction" (Besharov and Fowler, 1993, p.95). The growth in numbers of out-of-wedlock birt
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Approximate Word count = 4472
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)

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