Addiction: Father and Son

Steve Carell‘s new movie is called Beautiful Boy. I saw the preview last week and it promises to be a poignant, tender account of a father trying to help his son escape addiction.

According to Time magazine, nearly 20,000,000 Americans meet the criteria for a substance use disorder and an estimated 72,000 Americans died from drug overdose in 2017. That is a twofold increase in a decade as the opioid epidemic worsened.

There’s nothing more tender than the healthy relationship between a father and son. When it comes to addiction in our children, it is easy to blame ourselves or take personal accountability for the failure. However, addiction has a variety of causes and it is complicated to say the least.

Leaders in the counseling and drug rehab field have repeatedly told me that addiction is a spiritual deficit. In ourselves or others, we can help remedy that situation by paying attention to our spiritual side early on and continuously.

If there is a message for fathers in this kind of situation, it is to make sure we are providing spiritual leadership for our family, particularly our sons. We know that if fathers attend church regularly, for example, it is very likely the entire family will attend. And if fathers do not attend, teenage sons in particular are likely to drop by the wayside.

If you are fortunate enough to be one of those families not touched by addiction or substance abuse, give a prayer of thanks and make every effort to provide the spiritual leadership your family needs.