Chapter 2: Parenting Children While Living With Addiction and on Low Income: Illuminating “System Work” and Its Consequences

Considerable research has documented the impact of parental substance (mis)use on children’s health and well-being. In this chapter, I explore how low-income parents living with addiction engage in “system work” and how caring for children both shapes this work and is shaped by it. In-depth interviews with 15 parents are presented to illustrate system work as a specific type of institutionalized, unpaid labor that parents perform when following welfare rules and regulations at the same time they manage and navigate their relationships with other policy systems, that is, child welfare, mental health and addiction, and criminal justice. Parents’ relationships with their children are intertwined with their relationships with these multiple systems. Narrative analysis of parents’ stories reveals that two themes, kin loss and kinkeeping, characterize parents’ maintenance or re-imagining of their relationships with their children when they are engaged in system work. This research lends support to the argument for widening our analytical lens beyond micro-level interactions, to take into account meso- and macro-systems as shaping the family lives of parents mis/using drugs or alcohol and their children. Other implications of this research are clear. The severing or fraying of family ties can be prevented or at the least mitigated by exposing system work and developing ways to support this work and/or improving the design and administration of systems themselves.