Children of Alcoholics: Caged, Silenced Songbirds

MD Rama Pemmaraju Rao
03/31/2006

Imagine a house in which a child feels that the walls and floors are constantly moving and shaking. Would anyone be at peace in such a setting? For the children of alcoholics, life can feel much this way, and it is estimated that at least seven million children in America alone have alcoholic parents.

Common characteristics of caretakers and parents that accompany alcoholism-such as denial, dishonesty, selfishness, fear, and lack of consideration-have profound and direct effects on children. In this environment, self-esteem is not able to develop normally, and the emotional energy required to live with an alcoholic parent steals from the magic of childhood. These children instead learn to create walls and barriers to honest expression, and to resist sharing their emotions and developing trust. Such roadblocks cause children to shut down their own awareness of how they feel, affecting relationships with peers, relatives, and other adults. Children are left confused and full of self-doubt as they receive mixed messages from parents who are not behaving consistently, or honestly.

Children who speak up about the problem are often met with ridicule. Many times their observations, opinions, and insights are not acknowledged at all. Because immense denial is in operation about the use of alcohol and all of the destructive behaviors associated with it, children gradually disavow what they feel and lose touch with their own sense of what feels right and true.

Before intervention or treatment, children of alcoholics are like caged songbirds. They deny their own freedom because they become used to the dysfunction of constricted feelings and to restrictive ways of solving problems and conflicts.

Common emotional problems

Depression:

Children who have alcoholic parents may be at a greater genetic risk of developing a mood disorder, or they may develop depression that results from the helplessness and isolation they feel at home. It is particularly difficult when both genetics and circumstances create severe depression in children.

Guilt, shame, self-blame, and embarrassment:

Children exposed to the destructive forces created by alcoholic parents tend to blame themselves for the problems at an early age. This creates the difficult cycle of codependency throughout childhood and adult life in which the child feels responsible for the family chaos and tries to fix and rescue the disabled parents. This pattern runs so deep that children and adolescents may choose destructive and abusive relationships that do not meet healthy needs. The child of an alcoholic remains locked in the past, and often there is an immense conscious or unconscious desire on their part to take care of others and to try to fix other people's problems.