ALCOHOLISM

What do you think of when you hear the word Alcohol? You think about physical abuse, physiological harm, addictiveness... well how about emotional abuse? For many years alcoholics have been psycologically abusing their children with their disease. Many alcoholics don't know that alcohol causes conflict and mishap with their children so many continue the habit.

First let me tell you a little bit about alcoholism. It has many short and long-term effects that leads to very harmful physiological effects. Alcoholismhelp.com suggests that a short term effect of alcoholism is drinking so excessivly that the alcoholic faces hangovers, the body's way of saying you had too much. Usually a hangover can be treated with pills, rest, liquids, etc.

However many of the long-term effects of alcoholism cannot be treated so easily. Alcohol abuse leads to many diseases especially liver damage such as cirrhosis of the liver, alcohol hepatitis, thus causing damage to the digestive system and heart. Many alcoholics know about the long-term effects but choose to ignore them.

Next, let me discuss the downsides of having an alcoholic parent, which may give your child problems with their identity. A study done by Erwin on a measure of abstract and conceptual reasoning and verbal scores found that they were lower among children raised by alcoholics than children raised by non-alcoholics. This led many mothers of children of alcoholics to say that alcoholism affects the children's motivation, self-esteem , and future performance. According to Research on Children of Alcoholics, many school-aged children of alcoholic parents often have academic problems in school. As one child says:

"I was a sad, scared, and lonely child and I turned out to be a sad, sacred, and lonely adult. As a child, I didn't learn much about self-esteem, self-reliance, self-pride, and self- development. I did learn about self-pity and self-destruction.
(Wholey, 26)."

Many children who are now adults are faced with a hard life because they never learned about needed self-identifiable traits from their alcoholic parent. The life they were forced to lead was a life of always being quiet and never being allowed to express feelings As another adult wrote:

"Dad was into control. He wanted you to be quiet and "shut up." We were to be seen and not heard. "Don't make noise, don't interfere with me." His attitude was that "after all I've done, I should have all the space; you go sit over there on the edge."

It always seems to be "shhhh" for many children. Children of alcoholics are almost always quiet, shy, and feel ugly. How many children of alcoholics do you know that haven't been traumatized? These children are not alone and that is why the Children of Alcoholic Parents was formed. This website lets children of alcoholics talk with one another in a chat room, find out more information, or just browse around for answers to many questions.

References

This web page was developed by Cecilia Leyva to fulfill a requirement of the class CHI 21: Health Issues in the Chicano/Latino Community taught by Seline Szkupinski Quiroga in the Chicana & Chicano Studies Program at the University of California at Davis, Fall 1998.