A Legacy of Pain
The Intergenerational Transmission of Maltreatment, Addiction, and Foster Care
For my birthday this year, Leslie gifted me a six month subscription to ancestry.com. Having known vanishingly little about my ancestry, the past month has been incredibly humbling. Through my research, I learned about whole branches of my family tree that I previously knew nothing about. I stumbled across newspaper articles from nearly a century ago referencing my ancestors. I unearthed essential documents — military draft cards, immigration paperwork, census records — that helped me trace the movements of my family across space and time. I even found photographs of my great-great-grandparents, injecting life to the otherwise lifeless documents that detailed bits and pieces of their existence.
In addition to this research, I’ve been interviewing members of my family — most notably, my mother — and I’ve learned a ton. I’ll save the gory details for another day and another venue, but let’s just say my main takeaway thus far is as follows: the history of my family has been driven by endless cycles of maltreatment, addiction, and violence.
For generations, addiction has gnawed at my family. For decades, hurt has been handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. Dozens and dozens of jagged branches of my family tree, across time and space, have been inflicted with anger, have struggled to extricate themselves from the vicious cycles of pain, and have continued to bequeath harm to their children and their grandchildren to come.
Sadly, this is the story of so many families. Study after study after study has demonstrated that trauma is often the only inheritance that many folks can expect to receive from the people who came before them. This, I should note, is a global phenomenon, as researchers around the world have arrived at the same conclusion. Generation after generation, inextricably connected by a chain of unresolved trauma, each link in this chain an individual life laden with the pain, suffering, and challenges of the links that came before it. Trauma, it appears, is truly a family affair.
We don’t talk about this enough, in my opinion. Our focus — as a society — is often on individual, isolated acts of child maltreatment. Very rarely do policymakers frame the issue of child maltreatment as an intergenerational challenge. I hope to kickstart this conversation in this newsletter.
(As an aside, you might have noticed that I’ve been experimenting a bit with the publication schedule of this newsletter. You might notice it fluctuate a few more times, but barring any tremendous new insights, I’ll likely re-settle on my original schedule.)
An Unfortunate Legacy
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is often used by policy advocates to talk about the challenges facing families. Far be it from me to amend or dispute the great Tolstoy, but I’ll just add this: there’s a ton of things that unhappy families share. Namely, if the social science is to be believed, one of the things that many (but not all) unhappy families share is the transmissibility of their unhappiness to the next generation.
I knew, in a general sense, that children are impacted by the circumstances of their parents, but I didn’t know the extent of this impact. To be frank, it is shocking: “in families of parents who experienced maltreatment in their own childhood, the odds of child maltreatment are almost three times the odds of child maltreatment in families of parents without [this history].” While this includes multiple forms of maltreatment, a separate pair of authors put it much more bluntly, and far more tragically: “In general, beaten children are the beating parents of the next generation.”
Now I should note that this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Many folks (if not most) who experienced abuse as a child will not go on to abuse their children, and many people who do mistreat their children haven't themselves experienced maltreatment. But these studies just underscore how urgent it is to prevent child abuse, rather than simply responding to it (a tall task, I understand), for failing to do so has long-lasting consequences.
There are countless more studies that highlight this phenomenon, and while I won’t delve into them all, here’s a few findings (in bulleted form) from one systematic review of studies that I found particularly compelling:
Parents who report experiencing physical abuse or even witnessing violence in the home during childhood are at an increased risk for self-reporting that they also engage in abusive or neglectful parenting.
Maltreatment compounds: parents who report experiencing “multiple types or repeated instances of victimization” are at greatest risk for abusing their children.
Reported maltreatment creates a range of problematic parenting behaviors, including the following: role reversal (where the caregiving role between a parent and child is reversed), inconsistent discipline, permissive parenting, rejection of their children, authoritarian parenting, and others.
There’s an indirect — but real — relationship between childhood maltreatment and adult intimate partner violence.
Imagine the above playing out across generations, an endless cycle of abuse and maltreatment, year after year and decade after decade. Any child protection strategy must take into consideration this intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment if it has any hope of being effective.
Given that drug abuse was associated with 33% of child removals in 2022, we should also discuss addiction. As a note: I am not a geneticist, so if you are, please forgive me if my language on this topic is a bit clunky. That note aside, there is a genetic basis for addiction.
A 2023 study — which involved sifting through the genomic data of over one million people — identified genes that are “commonly inherited across addiction disorders, regardless of the substance being used.” This link between genes and addiction is applicable to general addiction, but these researchers also found genetic markers associated with an increased risk for alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, and opioid disorders.
Another study quantified this connection: alcohol addiction is about 50 percent inheritable, while addiction of other substances is about 70 percent inheritable. Now from what I understand, having these genes does not guarantee one will develop an addiction. Rather, these genes make one more susceptible to developing an addiction. They intersect with environmental factors — the availability of drugs, childhood adversity, socioeconomic status, and peer influence — which together influence the likelihood that a person would develop an issue with substance abuse. Unfortunately, many of these environmental factors are intertwined with conditions of poverty and the systematic disinvestment of wide swaths of the country, from cities to the rural communities.
Apparently, childhood aggression can be also linked to the actions of a child’s grandparents. A trio of researchers explored this phenomenon by studying 218 mothers and fathers (Generation One), their children (Generation Two), and their grandchildren (Generation Three). Specifically, they were investigating the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of “harsh parenting, substance abuse, and emotional distress” and their association with child aggression. They found a specific pathway through which certain challenges in one generation was transmitted across generations:
When Generation One (grandparents) struggled with alcohol abuse and harsh parenting, Generation Two (parents) struggled with alcohol abuse, emotional distress, and harsh parenting, all of which manifested itself in the presence of aggression in Generation Three (grandchildren).
Everything discussed thus far has obvious implications for the child welfare system. Families struggling with any of the issues above might interact, at some point in their lives, with the foster care system, or at the very least, with Child Protective Services (CPS). But what about foster care itself? Is foster care itself transmissible across generations? What about involvement in CPS? The data is limited, but there is evidence that this is indeed the case.
A team of researchers looked at a sample of 36,475 individuals born in Wisconsin in 1990-1991, tracking their involvement in Child Protective Services (CPS), out-of-home care, and America’s primary food assistance program (SNAP, or food stamps). Specifically, they looked at folks between the ages of 14 and 17, and then looked at them again when they were 25. They found that teens who were in foster care were about 3 times more likely to be involved with CPS as parents by age 25, relative to those who only grew up in poverty (and didn’t experience CPS).
This collection of studies communicates that the challenge of child maltreatment is much more complex than it would originally appear. Its building blocks are often embedded in family trees, as inheritable as brown hair or the family Bible. Left unaddressed, all of the above festers over time, working their way down a family tree and harming each successive generation in the process. Again, this is not always the case, and perhaps not even usually the case. But without truly understanding the intergenerational nature of child maltreatment, abuse, and involvement in the child welfare system, our efforts to protect children will fall flat.
A National Family Wellbeing Strategy
Given the compounding nature of the challenges I outlined in this newsletter, you’d expect our institutions to grapple with the intergenerational nature of child maltreatment, addiction, and child welfare system involvement. I am of the belief that they do not. Neither our policy infrastructure nor our orientation towards the problem of child maltreatment seem capable of addressing the generational harms we foist upon generations of children. We merely play a game of whack-a-mole, attempting to address maltreatment when it pops up rather than preventing it from popping up in the first place. To reach this point, we need to be asking and answering some hard hitting questions, such as:
What would it actually take to prevent child maltreatment from occurring, rather than simply responding to it after the fact?
What can we do to keep not only today’s kids safe, healthy, and happy, but tomorrow’s kids as well?
How can we restructure our child welfare system to break this intergenerational cycle, rather than merely managing its symptoms?
We need a National Family Wellbeing Strategy, predicated on a simple premise: if we heal today’s hurt, we can help stop tomorrow’s from occurring. This would require us to infuse our system with resources, to revitalize our left-behind communities, and to inject compassion in our approach to at-risk families. All of this, of course, is easier said than done, but both the children of today and those yet to be born are relying on us to act, and act decisively.
None of the above is inevitable. Millions of people have dodged generational curses, and many will continue to do so. But for those that haven’t and for those that cannot, we can build the infrastructure needed to finally help put an end to the endless cycle of trauma.
Thank you for reading, and I will see you in a few weeks!
Current Read(s):
I am beginning a book that has long been on my list: Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Phillipe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght. I have becoming increasingly interested in the concept of a basic income. My reasons are many, but one has to do with another book I read recently: Poverty for Profit by Anne Kim. In that book, Kim reveals how the complexity of our current social safety net allows profit-seeking interests to siphon public benefits away from their intended recipients. In addition, complex application processes mean that many people eligible for public benefits do not receive them. By simplifying public assistance, a basic income can potentially be more effective in helping those our social safety net is designed to help.
This is just one reason I’m interested in the idea of a basic income, but let us see the case this book makes!
What’s going on in the world of child welfare?:
Georgia Removed Her Kids Because She Was Homeless. The State is Charging Her $13,000 for Foster Care (WABE) — What a devastating article to read, one that underscores how desperately we need a national policy banning the practice of charging parents for foster care.
California Takes Money That Belongs To Foster Kids, Leaving Them Unprepared to Live Independently (Sacramento Bee) — This topic has featured prominently in this section, but yes, California should stop stealing money that belongs to foster kids.
Podcast: They Followed Doctor’s Orders. The State Took Their Babies (Reveal) — Parents who were prescribed medication to treat their addiction were then penalized for taking this medication.
Auburn’s Hugh Freeze Says Players Used NIL Money to Help Keep Children Out Of Foster Care (al.com) — A bit of good news! Some college football players are pitching in to keep families together.
With Support from Paris Hilton, California Lawmakers Pass Bill to Protect Teens in Treatment Programs (Los Angeles Times) — Some more good news!
Podcast: The Problems of Boys and Men in Today’s America (EconTalk) — A very sobering discussion on challenges facing boys and men in America (with the author of a book I read earlier this year).
Podcast: She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad. Child Services Took Her Baby (Reveal) — The podcast talks about how imprecise drugs tests can contribute to the dismantling of families.
Oregon Nonprofit Hears From State Caseworkers With Luggage Needs For Foster Children (Oregon Capital Chronicle) — Foster kids in Oregon are supposed to be given luggage when they move, rather than trash bags, but this might not be occurring
Adopted. Abandoned. But Not Forgotten (Kentucky Lantern) — An article that talks about something I haven’t heard discussed all that frequently: when an adopted child is abandoned by the family that adopted them.
Texas Child Removals Drop, but Concerns Still Linger (Dallas News) — Some interesting stuff is going on in Texas, and its too early to tell if this interesting stuff is good or bad for families.
Podcast: Raj Chetty’s Surprising New Insights on How Children Succeed (Capitalisn’t) — A great interview between a former professor of mine (Luigi Zingales) and a titan of research on intergenerational mobility.