HUL 263 Ist semester, 2011-12 Term Paper

Alcoholism among Children And Parental influence.

Submitted By: Kishan Kumar Sachdeva 2010ME10686 Group 2

Made By Kishan Kumar Sachdeva Indian institute of Technology Delhi

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Alcoholism among Children and the Role of Parents.

1. Introduction
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966), alcoholism is defined as A diseased condition due to the excessive use of alcoholic beverages. Parent behaviour plays a crucial role in alcohol consumption patterns of a child. Especially during adolescence, parents relations, behaviour and understanding with their child can altogether alter the path a child takes towards alcoholism in his/her life. Alcoholism in family systems refers to the conditions in families wherein indulgent of one or more family members has disgracing effects on the rest of the family. [1] Family alcoholism has been increasing in recent times. As of 2001, there were an estimated 26.8 million children of alcoholics (COAs) in the United States, with as many as 11 million of them under than age of 18.[1] Children of addicts have an increased suicide rate and on average have total health care costs 32 percent greater than children of non-alcoholic families.[1]Family alcoholism tends to destroy the harmony and basic foundation of the family as an institution. In recent times, terms like COA(Children Of Alcoholics) have been coined emphasising the concern about the above stated problem. The problem is so severe in western cultures. USA has set up two governmental bodies NIAA(National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) & COA(Children of Alcoholics);dedicated purely to tackle this problem. Adults from alcoholic families confront higher levels of anxiety and lower levels of cohesion than adults raised in non-alcoholic families. Adult children of alcoholics have lower self-esteem, excessive feelings of responsibility, higher incidence of depression, and increased likelihood of becoming alcoholics. [2]. The effects are not limited till here but numerous studies have shown that such family cultures promote drinking among children especially in adolescent stage .This has been linked via numerous studies to have a relation with Sexual problems in such adolescents going up to AIDS. Hence it can be ascertained children of drinkers have an increased risk of developing mental health problems, not only during childhood but also when they grow up into adolescents. In this paper we look upon how different type of attitudes and behaviours of parents tend to influence and shape the alcohol consumption patterns in their offsprings especially during adolescence. We begin with looking at kinds of relationships with parents affecting drinking among Indian adolescents then we move on to the pressing issue of COAs.

2.

Hypothesis
The Drinking pattern an adolescent settles down with is directly related to amount and level of parental intervention into his life.(3.A & 3.B) Further, prevalent culture of alcoholism and alcoholism abuse in the family has abominable effects on a childs psychology.(3.B & 3.C)

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3.A To Drink or not to Drink: The Indian adolescents Choice between Friends and Family
Yoshimitsu Takie, Patrick Lynch, and G. Mike Charleston (Professors, The Pennsylvania State University) carried extensive surveys and data collection from four different Indian cities/town, both rural and urban to test whether peers are more important than parents in influencing an adolescents perceptions towards alcohol. Information was gathered from 130 adults in forms of interviews having questionnaires about patterns of family interaction, drinking behaviour and attitudes towards drinking of family members.

Findings :

Percentage of Teenagers Drinking and: Related adults as a drinker Teenager spends night out without permission Teenagers peer affinity Teenagers have used drugs
Other facts found: The correlation between one of the parents being a existing drinker, and the frequency of drinking among the teenagers is 21% 60% people who were concerned with parents disapproval turned out to be drinkers against a 93% who were concerned with friends disapproval The older the teenagers were, the more frequently they drank (29% increase in no of drinkers on increasing age group by 3 years.)

21% 51% 41% 42%

Discussion
The above table exhibitions low order of correlations between rate of teenager drinking and interactions with related adults. In other words, those students who were more likely to value their friends over parents tended to drink more often. Parts of the survey intended to obtain data of the teenagers evaluation of their relationship with parents, strongly showed that teenage drinking is related to less affectionate relations with their parents. For example, 69% of those adolescents who said their fathers praised or encouraged them less than once a month for what they did were drinkers, whereas only 29% of those who reported their dads said something encouraging to them more than once a week were admitted drinkers at the time of the survey. Similar findings were evident in results on feeling of being close to parents and not being criticized regularly by their parents. The older the teenagers were, the more frequently they drank which is related also to their independence from parents. More worryingly, the frequency of drinking was quite intensely correlated with use of drugs.

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3.B Bonding with Father and effect on alcoholism.

Rough relations with the father are results to a child being depressed, demoralized, pessimistic about the future, and generally more emotionally unstable. Depressed mood and emotional instability in the child were expected to impact his behaviours and poorly affect his development during adolescence; ultimately affecting the latters alcohol use. Consider the following study from Journal of Addictive Diseases:

Procedure
Each pair of fathers and adolescents were interviewed separately and in isolated. The interview consisted of a number of wide variety of questions for assessing father and adolescent personality characteristics (e.g., depression, delinquency), father drug and/or alcohol use and HIV status, the father-child relationship (e.g., warmth), peer influences (such as involvement in deviant behaviours), and environmental factors (e.g., perceived discrimination).Here we shall concentrate on the finding on father-child relationship and father alcohol/drug use only. The dependent variable, regularity of adolescent alcohol use, was obtained from Adolescents use of beer and wine during the past year. Adolescents use of hard liquor during the past year. The response ranges were collected under the following categories :(1) Up to 3 times a month or less (2) Up to one to many times per week (3) Up to 1 or 2 drinks every day (4) Up to three or more drinks daily

Results
Various statistical measures of the data collected in the study were indicative of the following : (1) Adolescent personality was significantly related to adolescent alcohol use despite control on all of the other fields; (2) Domains of environmental factors, father-child relations, and father attributes lost significance with control on the adolescents personality; (3) Peer domain was significant with control on the adolescents personality; and (4) Father attributes domain was no longer related to adolescent alcohol use with control on the environmental, father-child relations, peer, and adolescent personality domains Also results of the study specified that the fathers actual drinking with his child was more highly related to the adolescents alcohol use than the fathers own use of alcohol, suggesting that the fathers drinking with his child incorporates multiple reasons namely, role modelling, inapt drinking norms, and the ease of access of alcohol (in the home). Moreover the findings indicate that Contrary to expectation, however, the fathers HIV status was not related to the adolescents alcohol use either as a main or an interactive factor.

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Interaction plot for father alcohol use and father warmth on the adolescents alcohol use.

Discussion
As clear from the above stated facts, depressed mood is associated with irritable or hostile behaviour toward individuals with whom one is close, as well as trouble in establishing and maintaining socially skilled behaviours such as effective parenting practices. Adverse family conditions have an impact on adolescent children through the disruption of the parent-child attachment relationship. The parent-child attachment relationship has found to have a positive influence on adolescent development and to be related to decrease in adolescent alcohol use.A close and affectionate mutual attachment relationship between the father and child, which includes paternal warmth and the childs identification with the father;(substantiated by the above graph) Control techniques which are appropriate and designed to provide the youth with structure regarding his or her alcohol use. The finding of no clear relation between HIV status of father and alcoholism is quite unexpected. Perhaps due to recent developments in the cure of HIV have significantly decreased AIDS-related sickness and mortality and thereby possibly decreasing the effects of paternal HIV on children.

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3.C Associations between Fathers Heavy Drinking Patterns in Children Of Alcoholics (COAs)
As mention before, examining patterns of heavy drinking in parents is relevant, because: (a)Treatment-seeking alcoholics may have the most severe drinking problems, and their children are therefore at greatest risk for maladjustment, (b) Anticipating treatment promises that at least some variation will occur in fathers drinking behavior, making it possible to adequately report the question of changes over the time.

Method
Selwyn Stanley, M.A (SW); Ph.D and C. Vanitha( National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences Bangalore, INDIA)conducted a study to investigate on how deeply family alcoholism affects the next generation. The study group consisted of 50 respondents whose fathers were receiving de-addiction treatment at a private psychiatric hospital in Tiruchirappalli, India. Only adolescents between the age group of 13 and 18 years and who were residents of Tiruchirappalli were included in the sample.\

Findings
40 % of the COAs reported daily drinking by their father while 42% said it was on alternate days, the remaining were not sure of the frequency of drinking. Regarding the duration of drinking, 53% said it was up to three years with the remaining respondents mentioning that it was in 3-10 years range. With regard to the behaviour of the father when drunk, o 44% said that he became more silent than usual, o 26% said that he became rowdy and shouted at others o Remaining 20% expressed that he scolding and beating up the family members.

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S No.

Mean value of parameter nCOAs COAs 1 Self-Esteem 81.10 97.26 2 Overall Adjustment 119.88 138.28 3 Education 17.36 19.66 4 Emotional Adjustment 32.06 36.08 5 Social Adjustment 40.97 41.38 MEAN SCORE PROFILE OF RESPONDENTS ON SUBJECT DIMENSIONS

Parameter

Discussion
The study has reveals that the majority of COAs manifest lower levels of self-esteem and a lesser degree of adjustment than nCOAs. The two groups of respondents were matched on key socio-demographic variables and the alcoholism of the father of the study group subjects was a major differentiating factor between the two. Alcoholism in family leads to building up of stress in children from a very young age which leads to low intellectual, thinking and IQ levels. This has a direct effect on childs educations which gets adversely affected. This occurs in the data shown above wherein its clear that COAs have poorer academic performance than their nCOAs counterparts. On very similar lines, it can be argued that COAs are expected to have lower emotional stabilities and emotional adjustments. The low self-esteem scores obtained by the study group respondents indicate feelings of dissatisfaction with oneself and feelings of not being skilled. It reflects a sense of alienation and feelings of insignificance and failure. Emotional maturity manifests in high self-esteem and enhances ones social ability. Thus the low self-esteem seen in COAs is indicative of poor emotional maturity and may diminish their interpersonal competency. This is reflected in the poor adjustment scores obtained by the COAs in this study. As the data of this study indicates that the stressful and vitiated domestic environment prevalent in alcohol complicated familial relationships is responsible for the low self-esteem and deficient adjustment seen in adolescent children of alcoholics. There is hence an imperative need for therapeutic intervention with this population. Also the study brings out the need that any effective de-addiction programme must acknowledge the necessity of adolescent children to overcome and deal with various deficits in their psychosocial functioning. Moreover treatment-associated reduction benefits not only the participant but it is equally possible that functioning of the entire family system including adolescent children also gets improved during the fathers low-drinking periods and worsened during the high-drinking periods. Our findings show that fathers heavy drinking patterns and childrens psychosocial problems appear to be closely related to one another over time, waxing and waning in meaningful patterns, such that childrens adjustment was improved during times of parental alleviated drinking and was worsened during times of parental exacerbated drinking. The findings of this study do not agree with number of research papers and researcher who found no significant relationship between parental alcoholism and self-esteem of their children(for example Churchill(1990) [3]). In contrast, the results are congruent with that of Morey (1999) [4], who reports that self-esteem ratings for COAs were significantly lower in comparison to ratings for nCOAs.
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4.

Conclusions
The extent of influence of parental factors where parents do not drink themselves and where alcoholism among children is predominantly in a peer group on the variations in drinking patterns by site illustrate that drinking may be mostly a social phenomenon among many people (viz., it is not largely psychologically or physiologically based), and, if so, drinking behaviour can change if community norms related to drinking change. However, consistent with the findings of various other studies, the drinking behaviour of parents seems to influence the teenagers in this sample. In Indian teenagers specifically those who drink, tend to be less controlled by and have less affectionate relationships with their parents than their peers who do not drink. But the parental relational are not completely independent with the drinking patterns. The degree of attachment to either parents or friends seems to be related to drinking among both teenagers and their younger brothers or sisters. Youths who do not drink are closer to their parents affectively and are under greater control by their parents. Therefore, those who drink tend to be youths who report less affectionate ties to their parents, consider their friends to be very important. The zeal to claim and to do things without consulting their parents can also be interlinked with escalating drinking frequency as a youth gains age. One way in which adolescents are known to assert their independence or self-sufficiency from parental control is through drinking. Therefore, teenagers tend to drink more as they mature in terms of age to assert their self-reliance. Paternal characteristics, such as depression, unorthodoxy, and drug and alcohol use, impacted the fathers relationship with his child and the youths personality, as well as the adolescents peer group. , the fathers attributes are associated with the perceived environment and ultimately, the adolescents alcohol use. Fathers child-rearing practices were related to the adolescents personality, which in turn was associated with adolescent alcohol use. These dimensions were : o Warm father-child mutual attachment relationship, including the childs identification with his/her father; o Quality time spent together by the father and youth. o The fathers appropriate control techniques, including rules about alcohol use and disapproval of use. The finding mentioned grave situation in cases of COA (Children Of Alcoholics).Some major concerns are that they: o Are at more at risk for alcoholism and other drug abuse than children of nonalcoholics. o Show symptoms of depression and phobias more than children of nonalcoholics. o Experience greater physical and mental health problems and higher health care costs than children from non-alcoholic families. o Score lower on tests measuring verbal ability.

Based on the findings of the above studies, we comes to following conclusions

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o Have greater difficulty with intellection and conceptual reasoning. The need of the hour is to develop programmes for parents of COAs with a strong focus on strengthening flexibility in them and to inculcate desirable personality traits and enhance their psychosocial functioning through appropriate psychotherapeutic procedures. Co-dependent adolescent children of alcoholics also merit therapeutic intervention owing to the various deficits in psychosocial functioning manifested in them.

With this the ,to summarize the first hypothesis of direct relation of parental intervention into a childs life and alcoholic pattern doesnt seem to be concrete since drinking among youth is largely associated with Socialization trends among youth. Nevertheless, there is still non-negligible effect of Parent-Child relations But the second hypothesis of effects on a childs psychology due to alcoholism in family stands with the effects as stated above.

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5.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

References
[1]

12. 13. 14.

15.

"WHO to meet beverage company representatives to discuss health-related alcohol issues". World Health Organissation. [2] American College Health Association. (2007). National college health assessment: Reference group executive summary. Baltimore: American College Health Association. [3] Volume 27, Number 2, January 1988.Yoshimitsu Takie, Patrick Lynch, and G. Mike Charleston. [4] Morey, C. K. (1999). Children of alcoholics: a school-based comparative study. Journal of Drug Education, 29(1), 63-75. Alcohol Use in Adolescents Whose Fathers Abuse Drugs: Merrill Singer, PhD Michael R. Duke, PhD. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1996; 71:937-952. Alcoholism and Its Effect on the Family. By Chassin, Laurie; Rogosch, , AllPsych Journal December 14, 2003. Canadian Center on Substance Abuse. (2010). Young adults and alcohol: How much is too much? Inaugural Bill Deeks Lecture, September 22, 2010. Churchill, J.C., Broida, J.P. & Nicholson, N.L. (1990). Locus of control and self-esteem of adult children of alcoholics. http://www.nacoa.org http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Pages/default.aspx Influence of family disharmony and parental alcohol use on adolescent social skills, self-efficacy, and alcohol use. By Webb JA, Baer PE.Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, Houston, TX 77030, USA. Journal of American Indian Education, January 1988, Topper, Martin D. (1974). "Drinking Patterns, Cultural Changes, Sociability, and Navajo Adolescents. Addictive Disease, 1, 97-116. Morey, C. K. (1999). Children of alcoholics: a school-based comparative study. Journal of Drug Education, 29(1), 63-75. Psychosocial Correlates in Adolescent Children of Alcoholics-Implications for Intervention.By Selwyn Stanley. Psychiatric Social Worker, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, Bangalore, INDIA. Substance use and symptomatology among adolescent children of alcoholics. By; Barrera, Manuel, Fred Parsons, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol 100(4), Nov 1991.

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