The Trauma of Children of People With Addiction

Children of alcoholics can also benefit from skill building that teaches them a “variety of coping and self-care strategies to stay safe,” according to the NACoA. The most popular is probably theLaundry Listfrom Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organization. Groups like Al-Anon and ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) provide free support and recovery. Work on this paper was supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Science (WT086516MA) to J. We are grateful for the assistance of John Witton and Johanne Longva in obtaining full‐text articles and for valuable comments by Kate Graham and the managing editor and three anonymous reviewers on previous versions.

Genetic risk is increased because the offspring may inherit a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism through the combined lineages of the maternal and the paternal sides of the family. In addition, if both parents have drinking problems, then the potential stress-buffering or moderating influences of a nondrinking parent are not present in the family. A Finnish study found that in substance abuse treatment contexts children how alcoholic parents affect their children of substance-abusing parents are seldom met in person, and their needs are rarely considered [11]. In many countries there are not enough services focusing on these children, and the professionals meeting substance-using parents have not been trained to work with children [13]. Early intervention is an opportunity to offer support and keep a watching brief of children’s welfare, thus preventing problems from escalating [14].

How does alcohol use affect children?

Navigating relationships with parents can be difficult, especially if they are navigating their own complex situations like addiction. According to the journal Pediatrics, children with FAS may also suffer from vision and hearing difficulties, deformed joints and limbs, and heart defects. The disorder can also affect the brain and central nervous system, causing learning disorders, memory problems, poor coordination and balance, hyperactivity, rapid mood changes and other problems. The adult may also be a high-functioning alcoholic, making it harder for the child to accept that their parent has a problem because it may not be as obvious. These may have been practical (like paying the bills) or emotional (like comforting your siblings when Mom and Dad fought). Now you continue to take responsibility for other people’s feelings or for problems that you didn’t cause.

Children also need to know that their parent’s alcohol addiction is not their fault and that they can’t fix it, but there are safe places and people who can help. Research shows that a child’s risk of becoming an alcoholic is greater if their alcoholic parent is depressed or suffers from other co-occurring disorders. Their risk also goes up if both parents are addicted to alcohol and other drugs, if the alcohol abuse is severe and if there is violence in the home.

Effect of Parental Drinking on Adolescents

Children exposed to maternal alcohol use during pregnancy have more problems related to cognitive and psychosocial development [30] and mental health [31] than other children. Extensive research on the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure supports the existence of a spectrum of diagnostic conditions, collectively referred to as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) [32]. However, it is not possible to separate the effect of prenatal alcohol exposure with our data as the register entries only detect the timing of treatment or death and not the timing of alcohol abuse.

Parents can play an important role in helping their children develop healthy attitudes toward drinking while minimizing its risk. Many adult children of alcoholic mothers face adjustment issues throughout their lives.1 Seeking help for alcohol use disorder is the first step toward preventing these issues and stopping the cycle of addiction and alcohol abuse. A negative self-image can also be the result of having alcoholic parents. Because children are dependent on caregivers, their self-perception develops as a reflection of how they are viewed by caregivers and authority figures.

Learn To Cope Healthily

Our data thus reaches only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the phenomenon, often noted in literature; registers do not include data on occasional use or abuse of alcohol or on patients within primary health care [18]. Thus, we do not know whether the effect of parents’ risky alcohol use (which has not necessarily yet developed as a problem) on their children is similar to the effects in this study [23]. Environmentally, having two alcoholic parents severely compromises the family’s ability to provide a stable, nurturing environment. Parenting skills are often lacking, and the potential for marital conflict is high.

• One of the most damaging aspects of parental alcohol abuse is the inconsistency it introduces into parenting behaviors.
• The influence of parental alcohol use disorder can disrupt the emerging pattern of parent-adolescent relations, affecting everything from parenting skills to family dynamics.
• External messages that you’re bad, crazy, and unlovable become internalized.
• The main strength of our study is that register data offer an exceptional possibility to study entire cohorts and otherwise hard-to-reach populations and difficult phenomena at low costs and without the problems of response rates.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry states that one in five adults in the U.S. grew up with an alcoholic family member at home. An unpredictable and unreliable environment can cause a child to feel unsafe in their own home. They may feel trapped and unable to escape the pain caused by their parent’s addiction to alcohol.

Risks for Children of Alcoholic Mothers

We can nonetheless assume that also they represented the higher end of the spectrum of alcohol use and abuse. However, our sensitivity analysis on parental problems related to the severity of the alcohol abuse indicated that our definition separates the severe and less severe cases of alcohol abuse. Even though the parents with less severe alcohol abuse encountered less problems than parents with severe alcohol abuse, their children had similar risks of mental and behavioural disorders. It is likely that ‘a threshold’ for these risks is realised on the lower levels of alcohol abuse that we were able to capture with register data.

• In particular, analytic reviews of possible impacts of parental drinking on that of their children seem feasible, as most of the existing cohort studies have addressed this association and further datasets are available.
• With open, respectful communication and explanations of boundaries and expectations, parents can continue to influence their children’s decisions well into adolescence and beyond.
• Only eldest children who did not have history of developmental delay were taken.