What Happens to the Children of Alcoholic Parents?

Alcoholism is an addiction that makes life incredibly difficult for the alcoholic and everybody else in their lives. The children of alcoholic parents, in particular, suffer emotional and psychological trauma as a result of growing up with dysfunctional parent-child dynamics.

The impact of having an alcoholic mother or father has both short and long-term effects that harm children by normalizing destructive, dangerous behaviors and irreparably damaging their relationships. These children need a lot of support to heal from their trauma, even when they become adults.

Immediate Effects of Having Alcoholic Parents

Parents have an enormous impact on their children’s development. Children go through several crucial developmental stages, from infancy to early childhood to adolescence, and neglectful, abusive, or emotionally absent parenting can stunt development or even cause children to regress.

Unfortunately, with approximately 3.3 million alcohol-related deaths occurring every year and millions more people living with alcohol use disorder (AUD), many children are suffering with alcoholic parents. ^[1]

Parental alcoholism has been proven to cause immediate and sometimes irreversible effects on children’s physical and emotional development. There are a range of psychosocial symptoms that children of alcoholics immediately exhibit, which may include:

• Anxious behaviors
• Difficulties concentrating
• Feelings of low self-esteem
• Anger issues
• Extreme emotional reactions to sensitive situations
• Early use of alcohol and drugs ^[1]

Regularly witnessing a parent rely on and abuse alcohol is highly traumatizing, and it shapes a child’s early emotional, psychological, and physical development. Parents who cannot function adequately without alcohol are typically unable to provide a safe, nourishing, and happy home for their children. These children may experience poverty and receive an insufficient education as a result of parental dysfunction. This fails to set them up for future success and creates mental health problems that will only worsen with age and increased parental trauma. ^[2]

Long-term Consequences of Having Alcoholic Parents

Being the child of an alcoholic isn’t something that is confined to childhood, unfortunately. Once the children of alcoholic parents grow up, their development will have been permanently influenced by how they grew up. This has long-term consequences for many aspects of their adult lives, particularly when it comes to forming healthy relationships with other people after years of looking after alcoholic parents.

Many former children of alcoholics grow up to be hypervigilant in their interactions because they may have grown up having to mask difficult home situations or hearing people mock their parents’ alcoholism. They are usually more impulsive than people who didn’t grow up with alcoholic parents, so they can be quick to snap at others or read malintent into harmless social situations. They may also have some controlling tendencies due to being responsible for their parents at an early age, so they prefer things a certain way and don’t react well to interference. This can make it difficult to maintain long-term romantic relationships and friendships. ^[3]

The adult children of alcoholic parents are also more likely to display symptoms of psychiatric disorders when compared to children who didn’t have alcoholic parents. They typically demonstrate a higher risk of anxiety, agoraphobia, depression, panic disorder, and other phobias. Some are likely to follow in their parents’ footsteps and abuse alcohol or other addictive substances, which exacerbates the symptoms of mental illnesses and also encourages antisocial behaviors.

Not every child of alcoholics will develop mental illness, but the trauma parental alcoholism inflicts on developing minds has devastating psychological consequences. ^[4]

Common Coping Mechanisms and Behaviors

Any child who experiences continuous trauma growing up will naturally develop coping strategies to ground their emotions and give them something else to focus on. However, these coping mechanisms usually aren’t healthy because the children of alcoholics spend their formative years being exposed to chronic stress and forced into making adult decisions. Their psyches struggle to deal with difficult situations, so they frequently display worrying behavioral patterns.

Two personality traits that the children of alcoholic parents are liable to display are perfectionism and a desire for approval. They typically don’t receive adequate praise within alcoholic homes, so they strive to receive it wherever else they can, be it in school, at work, or from their friends or partners. With their parents’ reliance on alcohol out of their control, the children of alcoholics may dedicate themselves to perfecting their own lives. While this isn’t inherently negative, perfectionism can be insidious when it controls an individual’s entire life. ^[3]

It’s common for the children of alcoholics to avoid the topic of alcoholism altogether. Growing up in an alcoholic home teaches a child that problems and secrets must be confined to the family unit, so they struggle to let others in. They may also prioritize pleasing other people as a way to make up for past trauma, which leads them to minimize their needs and neglect self-care. These children also find it easier to cope by avoiding all conflict, even if it means sacrificing their mental peace, because it reduces anxiety. However, this behavior harms an individual’s abilities to regulate emotions, defend themselves, and develop healthy coping strategies. ^[3]

Can Alcohol Use Disorder Be Passed On to Children?

Society regularly assumes that the children of alcoholic parents will grow up to abhor alcohol and abstain from drinking. However, AUD can actually be hereditary and environmentally based. While a person’s genes do have an influence on whether or not they will abuse alcohol, their environment also plays a large part. The normalization of alcohol dependency throughout their childhood conditions them to believe that substance abuse is common behavior.

As a result, they develop unhealthy relationships with alcohol and may turn to it to numb themselves, which indicates high levels of long-term stress. Drinking may also be a way for them to connect with their parents and try to understand why they were so dependent on it. ^[5]

Any type of family dysfunction increases a child’s risk of developing substance abuse issues in adolescence or adulthood, but growing up around alcohol really reinforces its addictive influence. Alcoholics are unable to regulate their drinking, so they drink excessive amounts and usually cannot function well enough to parent their children.

These children may not be able to have open conversations about alcohol with their parents, so they’re more likely to explore unhealthy drinking patterns and become similarly dependent on the substance. It’s a vicious cycle that claims victims when they’re still children unless it can be broken.

How to Protect Children from the Negative Effects of Alcoholism

One of the biggest challenges facing the children of alcoholic parents is that they never truly got to be children. They were forced into caretaker roles at young ages to ensure the family unit didn’t disintegrate, at the cost of their childhood, education, and emotional well-being. However, it is possible for these individuals to persevere and overcome adversity despite their dysfunctional upbringings.

There are a variety of support systems available for navigating childhood trauma and making important changes in adulthood. The National Association for Children of Addiction (NaCoA) is one example of an excellent support system that specializes in the trauma that alcohol and drug addiction causes to families.

NaCoA offers programs and resources to help victims of parental alcoholism come to terms with their trauma and work on eliminating it. Once you have all of the information, you can consider seeing a therapist one-on-one to create healthy coping strategies and talk through your pain.

Support groups are also a great therapy option because it gives the adult children of alcoholics a chance to meet people who had similar circumstances and share their experiences. Hearing somebody else validate your trauma in such a personal way opens up avenues for collective healing.

Individuals are encouraged to consult their local Mental Health America Affiliate Resource Center to find specific support groups near them. There are also online support groups available on social media for those who grew up in alcoholic homes.

Breaking the Cycle: Healing and Recovery

The cycle of alcohol addiction is not easily broken, but many adult children of alcoholics are eager to escape the fates of their parents. They are usually at higher risk of developing AUD themselves because they lack social support, communication skills, and self-esteem due to their stressful upbringings in alcoholic homes. In order to heal and recover from the trauma induced by witnessing their parents abuse and depend on alcohol, these individuals require strong support systems. ^[6]

The first step is to tackle harmful behavioral patterns and consider what causes them. Children of alcoholic parents are at increased risk of developing poorer mental health and acting out as a result of unresolved trauma. Few children seek help because they’re accustomed to keeping parental alcoholism a family secret, but once they’re adults, they may look for solutions. Society must avoid stigmatizing therapy options and ensure resources for the adult children of alcoholics are well-publicized. ^[6]

More education is needed on the whole to avoid alcoholism becoming a guilty secret that people are too ashamed to open up about. The children of alcoholic mothers and fathers understand what alcohol does to a person’s mind and body but cannot break the cycle without greater awareness. In order to heal, they must feel comfortable in their communities and relationships. Otherwise, they’re more likely to turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms, like substance abuse, than therapy.

Alcoholic parents may also recover and seek to make amends with their children for things that happened in the past, and this can help a great deal with the emotional recovery. Being able to let go of traumatic childhood responsibilities and prioritize themselves puts the children of alcoholics in control for the first time. But even if their parents never recover or reconcile with them, these individuals can still recover and go on to live happy, fulfilling lives, so long as there are societal support systems in place to aid their mental healing.