No parent likes to acknowledge that his child might be a drug user. It seems to be an admission of failure as a parent and is a frightening recognition that something must be done. To avoid this painful possibility, parents cover up, avoid seeing what is obvious to others, or deny the extent of the problem. “Secrecy is the biggest enemy,” one father of a drug-abusing boy told Washingtonian Magazine. “In trying to keep anybody from knowing what was going on in our family, we reached the point where we didn’t know ourselves.”

A policeman in Deerfield, Illinois, has his own method for waking parents up to the truth. “If I find a kid drinking in a car,” he says, “parents don’t believe me unless I call them and tell them to come down and pick the kid up. There’s a lot of denial, and I’ve really become tough.”

Parents also can inadvertently prolong the drug use. One mother says, “We did everything. We made excuses for him when he cut school. We got him a tutor when he was failing. We arranged for saxophone lessons because that was something he liked and we thought he would be less angry. Only after we recognized that drugs were the problem did we learn he and his music teacher had been doing cocaine together.”

Counselors see covering up, making excuses, and sidestepping reality as enabling. Parents often play this role out of love. Unfortunately, what they actually accomplish is to derail the process leading toward recovery. If they have a family history of alcoholism, they have often seen enabling at work, and as adults are more likely than others to deny there is a problem. They may have heard their mother call their father’s employer and say, “He has a virus,” when he was really hungover.

One grown daughter of an alcoholic father really didn’t want to know what was going on with her own teenage daughter. Even when she found that liquor was missing, she never mentioned it. She just took the nearly empty bottle of Amaretto and put it on top of the refrigerator—“then she knew that I knew.” The conspiracy of silence in this house was particularly strong because the alcoholic grandfather (“he’s not that bad”) was living in the downstairs apartment of his daughter’s house.

A father whose own father “had a drinking problem” didn’t recognize what was going on with his drug- and alcohol-abusing son for ten years. “Then I didn’t just wake up one day and realize it. it happened slowly, inch by inch. I knew something was wrong. His grades dropped, we were fighting at home, but I didn’t see what it was,” he says. According to Joan Duncan, formerly director of family services at the Monmouth Chemical Dependency Treatment Center in Long Branch, New Jersey, “Parents usually accept the possibility of drug and alcohol abuse only as a last resort.”

If you yourself are the child of a drug abuser or alcoholic you undoubtedly know from personal experience how hard it is to grow up in a chaotic household. The child and grandchild of alcoholic men says, “The thing I always question is, how do you be a good mother? How much of what I do is because I feel guilty? I’m constantly looking to see who is a good parent—where can I find a model?”

Uncertain parents such as this mother have to be particularly careful that they don’t overreact to their child’s experimental use of alcohol or drugs, or feel helpless if they can’t “fix” the child as they desperately wished to fix the alcoholic parent.