Alcohol and Parenting
Our view of parenting can differ. Many people change their habits when they have children, whereas others want to carry on living as they did before they had them. Neither of these situations is either right or wrong, but there are some aspects of living with children that it could be important to consider.
When you drink alcohol, even in moderation, it has an adverse effect on your judgment and your ability to see to the child’s needs and provide the care that a small child needs. It also has an adverse effect on your ability to understand and react and small children need to be surrounded by alert parents and adults. There is a greater risk of accidents when consuming alcohol. A Swedish survey of children’s experience of corporal punishment shows that there is a strong correlation between alcohol consumption among parents and corporal punishment of children.
You behave slightly differently even when you are only moderately under the influence of alcohol. Your pace, patience and your way of expressing yourself changes. Children are by nature creatures of habit who are most comfortable with the predictable because it makes them feel secure. It can cause stress in young children if their parents, who are their greatest source of security, start behaving differently. They often react to just slight changes in their parents’ behaviour that involve unpredictability — it makes a bigger difference for the child than we adults imagine.
Most adults, and particularly parents who don’t have problems with alcohol, naturally avoid getting drunk around children, even though there may be some degree of tolerance on special occasions such as during festive periods. Studies in which children are interviewed show that children don’t like the way adults change, even after drinking a moderate amount of alcohol. The adult may think that he or she is more relaxed and jovial, but to a child the adult appears silly and erratic and sometimes even dangerous. Children talk about how they’ve been frightened by adults’ raised voices and the insecurity they felt when their parents and other adults weren’t recognisable and didn’t appear to care about them as much. Children are very sensitive to their parents’ and other important adults’ facial expressions and emotional reactions and can easily become worried if these change in a way that they don’t recognise and can’t understand. For people consuming alcohol in normal amounts, there are clear effects on their behaviour even after one or two glasses of wine, for example.
This text focuses on alcohol, but can also be applied to other drugs that alter adults’ behaviour and their ability to react, for example narcotics and abuse of narcotic medicines.
Things to consider
- What do you, as a parent, think about how alcohol consumption can affect your specific child?
- How does it affect your child/children if you drink at home or if the child is in an environment where other people are under the influence of alcohol?
- Do you and your partner have the same view or do you have different views on how you should relate to alcohol when you have the children with you?
If you have any questions or thoughts about alcohol and parenting, you can bring it up at the BVC. There is information and support available at anhorigstodet.se for people who have children with a person who has addiction problems. Anhörigstödet [Support for Relatives] is run by beroendecentrum Stockholm [the Stockholm Centre for Dependency Disorders] and is developed together with SKL [Sverige Kommuner och Landsting — the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions] and Folkhälsomyndigheten [the Public Health Agency of Sweden]. Riddargatan 1 is a specialist clinic run by the Centre for Dependency Disorders and Karolinska Institutet riddargatan1.se.
