What children say

Three children were interviewed, two girls and one boy from two families. Family 1 consisted of one girl, aged fifteen and one boy, aged nine. They were seen at the alcohol agency their mother had used three years previously. They were interviewed together and then separately (the boy with his mother present, at his request). Family 2 consisted of one girl, aged nine, and one boy, aged twelve (who did not wish to be interviewed). The girl was seen in her home with her mother present.

The interviews varied in length from 20 to 60 minutes. A set of questions was used to cover the relevant issues. However, the children influenced the structure of the interviews and were allowed to prioritise what they wanted to say.

Isolation
One of the most striking issues apparent from the interviews was the high degree of isolation experienced by the children both while the parent was drinking and, interestingly, after the parent had stopped. The parents had received support and help in coming to terms with their problems; the children had not, but clearly felt the need for it: ‘I didn't know whether I had the right to contact services once mummy stopped drinking'.

Only one of the three children had told an adult outside the family that there was a problem, referring to their mother being 'not well'. This was after many years of keeping quiet. Fear of what others might do or think stopped them from talking: ‘I didn't want to tell anyone because I was afraid of what social services would do'. One girl had tried to talk to friends but ‘they didn't listen’. The older girl felt that she could not burden her friends, so she kept quiet.

The older girl felt that teachers should have been able to pick up on signs of their distress: ‘Homework being handed in late, being very tired, once I fell asleep at school and being absent'.

There was evidence of children taking on extra re­sponsibilities and difficulties in establishing normal parent/child roles once the parent had stopped drink­ing. During one interview the young person said: ‘I hated this woman, this counsellor who mummy was seeing. I was jealous of her. She had taken my role away from me’. The child had received no support in coming to terms with her past experiences and the changes that were now forcing her to re-define herself as a child: "I needed some explanation of what was going to happen. We had no warning about the changes that would take place in the family when mummy stopped drinking'.

Loss
When a parent is drinking the child experiences a loss. The parent is absent in the sense that they are not meeting the needs of the child. There is also the loss of security, reassurance and the experience of being cared for. One boy of nine said to his mother: ‘I didn't know whether you loved me’.

Another felt she had lost her childhood: ‘At the age of eight I became like my daddy's wife, not in a sexual way but in all the other things’. Children are often left to deal with many of the practical chores for day to day living. This seems particularly true when the parent who is drinking is the mother. The young person went on to describe how, even now her mother has stopped drinking, she cannot get on with being a teenager ‘like other children my age’.

Loss was also experienced around special events such as birthdays and Christmas: ‘I remember a Christmas... you were so drunk you weren't around. It was difficult'.

The children interviewed felt unable to bring friends home, wanting to keep the parent's drinking secret and fearing the state their parent might be in.

They had many fears about potential loss: ‘I was scared that mummy would kill herself with drink', ‘I was scared that my daddy would leave’, ‘I was scared that I would not see my daddy again'. Even after the parent stopped drinking children still feared the loss of their parent through drink. They worried that they might do something which could result in the parent returning to drink.

What might have helped
The older girl expressed a need to have ‘someone to talk to’, to share some of her experiences and off-load some of her feelings. She suggested that the school counsellor would be the best person to talk to. The younger children wanted someone ’to tell mummy to stop drinking’ and would have liked reassurance. The child who had told another adult said that it had been helpful to hear that people do get better. One said that she would have liked to have been able to go away from time to time.

These children are a very vulnerable and secretive group. Although their parent may eventually receive help, they frequently do not and they continue to feel the need for help after the parent has stopped drinking.

Jacob
Jacob is 12 and lives in a former mining village on the outskirts of a large northern city with his mother, his older sister and his mother’s partner who has been with the family for some years and acts as the children’s father and main wage-earner. His mother had been ill for some time, with what she described as ‘nerves’. Jacob also knew that there was ‘something wrong with her tummy’. When he was in the top year at primary school the teachers became concerned about what they described as his ‘overreaction’; if he was worried or upset he would become angry and agitated and, although at that stage he was not violent to other pupils, the teachers were worried enough to approach the Education Department’s Special Needs Support Unit.

After Jacob had started secondary school his mother had a hysterectomy. This was desperately distressing for her, because one of the things she had hoped for was to have a baby with her present partner. After this she started drinking much more heavily and in a more chaotic way. She had previously had a part-time job, but lost it when she had to go into hospital. At about this time her partner also lost his job and his drinking increased, although not to the same extent. She found it increasingly difficult to look after the home; there was often no food and no money to buy food because she was starting to run up debts to buy drink.

Jacob and his sister found themselves being blamed by their stepfather for not taking over the running of the house from their mother, they would often come home to find their mother incoherent and incapable of standing and were getting an explicit message from their grandmother that ‘She doesn’t care about you – if she did, she’d sort herself out’.

Six months after the operation his mother took an overdose and Social Services became involved. Because his stepfather was not the legal guardian, they considered taking Jacob into care (although this never happened), which frightened the whole family, enraged the stepfather who had taken responsibility for the children as if he was their natural father and certainly threatened their future relationship with Social Services. Meanwhile, Jacob’s behaviour was deteriorating. He was involved in fraud, stealing cheques , assaults, regularly got involved in fights (many of them defending his mother from criticism and ridicule within their community) and was very close to being excluded from school.

Throughout all this, the Support Teacher was making regular visits to the family and got Jacob’s permission to talk to the school about his mother’s drinking. She made contact with the local Alcohol Advisory Service for information about their services for young people, worked closely with the school, particularly with the classroom teachers and encouraged the school to be supportive in a number of quite specific ways, like letting him have access to a phone to call a local helpline (which meant that there was a teacher around to look after him if he was upset) and finding ways of helping him to manage his anger.

Meanwhile, Social Services were carrying out extended family visits, trying to help the family get to grips with the problem and particularly to ensure that the stepfather understood the need to take his share of responsibility away from the children. Towards the end of the summer term of Jacob’s first year at secondary school, a case conference was called at the school, involving teachers, the Support Teacher, the Social Worker, Jacob and his mother. Jacob’s mother was too drunk for the case conference to proceed, and was taken home by the Support Teacher. Shortly after she assaulted Jacob.

Everyone involved with the family was concerned that he might become seriously violent and injure someone. The school continued to handle him extremely well, but with the summer holidays approaching, Social Services and the Support Teacher felt that a decision had to be taken about whether it was safe to leave the family together.

Throughout all this, Jacob’s mother had very little help with her alcohol problem. She was told, by her GP and the hospital psychiatrist, that help was available ‘when she was ready to take it’, but first she had to be ready to stop drinking.

At the time of writing, Jacob’s future is still unclear.

Carol and Gerry
Carol and Gerry are 11 and 14 years old respectively. They live with both parents in a council estate in the East Midlands. This estate is reputed to have the highest incidence of car thefts and burglaries in the county. Their mother, Lily, works full-time in low paid, manual employment. Their father, Ian, is unemployed, and the family struggles financially.

The family as a whole is socially isolated. Their relatives will not talk to Lily, whom they find hostile towards them. Neighbours regard her as rude and verbally abusive towards them and friendships which once existed have long since disappeared. It is Ian who has the drink problem, but relatives see Lily’s behaviour as the cause of this. Ian has been a heavy drinker for many years, drinking several cans of strong lager each day. He spends all day in a separate room in the house, drinking and playing computer games. He occasionally takes Gerry to a football match, which causes friction between Gerry and the rest of the family. Ian and Lily sleep separately. Often, after a family dispute, Carol and her mother will share a bed.

Things came to a head when Gerry approached the school counsellor and threatened to run away from home and kill himself unless something was done about Ian’s drinking. On this occasion, Carol supported him, saying that she would also run away if her mother refused to seek professional support. Lily finally took the initiative to approach a Family Support Service at the local Alcohol Counselling Centre.

During sessions with the family worker, Carol, Gerry and Lily explored a whole range of quite complicated issues. Lily complained of feelings of depression and fatigue and of her anger at Gerry’s relationship with Ian. She particularly resented the fact that Gerry was the only member of the family to get any attention from Ian and, oddly, that he never helped with the household chores while Carol helped every day. Gerry pointed out that he and Ian only went to one football match a season and that Ian had told him that household chores were Lily’s and Carol’s responsibility. He said he felt his mother did not love him. Carol talked about her feelings of loneliness and isolation at school. She felt unpopular with other school pupils ‘because I cry too much’, believing that they were incapable of understanding her predicament. She described her life at home, which involved her taking the role of Lily’s support and confidante, often, when they shared a bed comforting her tearful mother until she had gone to sleep.