The Lasting Effects of the Opioid Crisis on Children and Families: Talking About a Stigmatized Topic

A parent’s job is to prepare their children for what happens in life, not to shield them from it. Easier said than done, right?

My family watches TV using streaming services, which means we control exactly what we see. My kids’ grandparents, however, have cable TV, often turned on and playing in the background. When my two children were very young, I remember lunging for the remote as the news came on. I couldn’t turn it off fast enough. I wanted to protect them from stories like a traffic stop gone wrong or the death toll from a weather event or people dying from drug overdoses on the street.

But the reality is that children witness the world around them. For some children, that reality hits close to home. I was struck by this when I worked as a medical editor and watched the opioid crisis play out in real time. The focus was on the people who were dying, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids who were left behind to witness the effects of the crisis.

A recent study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that during the decade from 2011 through 2021, over 320,000 children lost a parent to overdose. In an interview for NPR, NIDA’s director, Dr. Nora Volkow, said “we don’t really speak much about” the impact of the overdose epidemic on children. I have seen this firsthand.

Last fall, I was an attending author at the Louisville Book Festival in Louisville, KY. Nearly every person who visited my table knew a friend, family member, or neighbor who had been affected by the opioid crisis. An author at the table next to me—also a mom—had written a memoir about her experience coming out of opioid addiction (The Nature of Pain, by Mandi Fugate Sheffel). One mom told me that her ten-year-old son had been asking questions about opioid use, because his friend’s dad died of an overdose.

“I don’t know what to tell him,” she told me.

Children impacted by the crisis might not want to talk about having lost a parent to an overdose. They might feel stigmatized at school or among their friends. A framework for having challenging conversations can help families, schools, and communities affected by the crisis. Books provide a safe space for having such discussions.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Demon Copperhead because she “wanted to write a novel about the epidemic of opioid use disorder that was tearing apart the place and people I love.” She has strong ties to Appalachia, having spent part of her childhood in rural Kentucky. She recently wrote an introduction to a photo essay in The New York Times (“The Opioid Crisis Never Ended. It Was Inherited by the Children.”) in which she observes that addiction is “a condition that nobody has ever asked for.”

“If you came to visit me, I could walk you down our country roads and point out all the houses where grandparents are raising little ones whose parents are incarcerated, sick or dead of addiction.” She notes that the hardest stories are the ones that begin in the mother’s womb. In West Virginia, according to West Virginia University researchers, from 2020 to 2022, nearly one in eight babies was born exposed to drugs—ten times higher than national rates.

It is important that we understand these statistics, but it is even more important to recognize that hundreds of thousands of young people in our country have first-hand experience of the opioid crisis. If we can talk about opioid use and bring this stigmatized topic out into the open, it can help the kids affected by the epidemic feel less alone.

Bio: Lauren Bomberger Fischer was born and raised in Indiana, graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and lives in Chicago with her family and rescue cats. She edited many articles about the opioid epidemic while working as a science editor at The JAMA Network. She advocates for LGBTQ and disability representation in children’s fiction. Her debut middle grade novel, Orphanland, was published in November 2025. Find her online at https://www.laurenbfischer.com, @authorlaurenfischer (Instagram), and at Lauren Bomberger Fischer, Facebook author page.