Reframing caring for parents who struggle with substance‐use disorders

Abstract

Nancy Suchman and the colleagues she influenced have produced ground‐breaking and attitude‐challenging work in understanding how parenting and substance use come together. Dr Suchman and her colleagues make the claim that there is nothing about a substance‐use disorder that precludes effective and sensitive caring for children especially with interventions that focus on the parent–child relationship. Suchman's legacy is to highlight how substance use as an illness pulls individuals away from important, caring relationships and limits their giving themselves to those relationships. Restoring the salience of caring relationships and of the individual's ability to care may be as impactful on their substance use as a strict focus on the reduction of drug use and achieving abstinence.

Maternal cognitive functioning and psychopathology predict quality of parent-child relationship in the context of substance use disorder: A 15-month longitudinal study

“…In the present study, dyads whose mothers presented higher cognitive resources seemed to benefit more from the treatment offered by the residential community. Anyway, the process of change appeared to be slow and results required a rather long time to become observable (Greenson, 2018;Knekt et al, 2011), suggesting the need to integrate the treatments provided with modules specifically focused on parent-child relationship which could be more rapid and effective in supporting quality of care (Lowell et al, 2023;Mayes, 2023;Suchman et al, 2004Suchman et al, , 2006.…”

Enhancing parental reflective functioning: A special tribute to the life and work of Nancy E. Suchman, PhD

“…To conclude our special issue, we end with comments from Arietta Slade (2023) and Linda Mayes (2023), two of Nancy's close colleagues who are leading scholars in the fields of parental mentalizing and the neurobiology of addiction and parenting. They comment, respectively, on the impact that Nancy's work has had on the fields of mentalizing, addiction, and parent intervention.…”