Conventional Wisdom about Familial Contributions to Substance Abuse

Abstract

Conventional social-science wisdom about the family background of substance abusers breaks down into three hypotheses. The broken home causes substance abuse; overprotective mothers with or without neglectful fathers cause substance abuse; substance abuse is reinforced by the changes it brings about in family interaction. The broken-home hypothesis attributes substance abuse to sheer absence of a parent, usually the father. The overprotective-mother hypothesis emphasizes the effect of indulgent, dominant mother behavior sometimes combined with ineffectual father behavior. The increased-control hypothesis emphasizes the effects of substance abuser, parents, and siblings on one another. Because investigations of these hypotheses are necessarily correlational, existing research on the family backgrounds of substance abusers suffers from methodological flaws characteristic of weak correlational designs. These hypotheses are logical extensions of Freudian theory, early social-learning theory, and revised social-learning theory respectively. Assumptions that pertinent aspects of the more general theories have been upheld by empirical investigation are not justified.