TEENAGERS AND ALCOHOLIC PARENTS

We have frequently been told that when a child has an alcoholic parent he is more apt to be disturbed or immature in his development. To investigate this question we sent two students, working under a grant from the Royal Bank, to go out and interview 54 teenagers who were randomly selected from the same communities whose parents had no problems with alcohol. A control group was thus deliberately chosen because it was felt that teenagers in general may be regarded by some people as disturbed or immature. A second kind of control was introduced as well, in that teenagers with parents who had continued to drink were contrasted with teenagers who parents had stopped drinking.

Interviews with all the teenagers included some testing so that both test scores and opinions could be compared among the groups. When the data was analyzed it was found that teenagers of alcoholic parents were no more disturbed than other teenagers in terms of interpersonal maturity, verbal intelligence, anxiety , depression or social isolation. Nor were they more likely to drink or take drugs. An exception to this was the teenagers took more tranquilizers if their parents continued to drink after treatment. There was also another important difference; Teenagers of alcoholic parents were more estranged from their parents than were the controls. This was more true for teenagers with fathers who were alcoholics than for those with alcoholic mothers.

But there was a gratifying finding. This alienation from parents was generally found to be overcome if the parents had stopped drinking after treatment at the Donwood. Half of the teenagers whose fathers continued to drink, for example, wanted a different father. By comparison, no teenager with a recovered father wanted to replace him. There was also evidence that teenagers compensated for the lack of closeness with an alcoholic father by drawing closer to their peers.

There was one effect which remainded unchanged in response to the father's recovery, however, the teenager's self concept. On this measure the teenager's self-esteem remained impaired, even when the father had stopped drinking. For all the measures of family estrangement and discord, the initial levels were enriched in response to the parent's stopping use of alcohol.

So what were the import findings of this study? That what really was hurt was the relationship between the alcoholic parent and his teenager. Consequently, it seems important in the process of recovering from alcoholism for a parent to re-establish a broken relationship with his children. If this relationship can be improved, it seems unlikely that there will b permanent damage done to the teenagers improvment in such relationships, however, is unlikely to come unless it is worked at, unless children are listened to with care, consideration, and warmth, and unless they are encouraged to express themselves in ways which help them to become independent human beings in their own right.

DR. JOHN MCLACHLAN
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH.

DON SAYS: Dr. McLachlan was on staff at the Donwood Institute at the time of writing this article. What I read into all this is the wonderful success of Dr. Bell's method of studying and helping those addicted to alcohol and drugs. Dr. Bell was brilliant, and we will greatly miss him.