I was reading about alcoholics and their families on Wikipedia, doing some research. I am a little unsure how to interpret this statement:
"Children of untreated alcoholics scored lower on:
measures of family cohesion
intellectual-cultural orientation
active-recreational orientation. "
Can anyone define for me, by giving an example, what these three things actually mean? I assume CofA were given various tests to measure damage done, and these sound like clinical findings, but I’m not a sociologist or counsellor.
This is not intended as a snarky comment, but Wikipedia should have references for these kinds of statements, and if it’s a good reference, it should explain what was measured for all of these terms. Asking people to guess the meaning of these statements is not going to be useful.
It appears that that is what is meant - children living with an unrecovered alcoholic aren’t close to their families, and don’t do as well in school or sports.
‘Not close with their families’ is a given. So #2 is school and #3 is sports. That’s what I wanted to know. I can see how living with a noisy anxiety-provoking drunk would, say, cut into one’s concentration on homework (though the person I was looking up information for poured her entire life force into getting jobs from an early age to pay for an education - which allowed her to get out of her toxic surroundings and qualify her for a good job, far away). Same with reading books or doing cultured things - who can relax and read in that home, who in that home would have any interest in the ballet or the arts? Still confused about how an alcoholic family would impact a child’s interest or ability in sports. Stay home from football practice to take care of the younger siblings? Aren’t given proper nutrition in the home, don’t get enough rest to do well in tryouts? Well, thanks for the answers.
Oh, hornswaggle! Those stats used to piss me off as a kid. Where did they get them? I certainly never took any test or any survey, neither did my friends, brothers “Ronald and Donald”, or “Anne”. We’re all children of unrecovered alcoholics and NONE of their stats have ever applied to us. So where did they get the kids for the quiz? They certainly never asked kids like us, and it annoyed me to no end to be told how I was expected to be.
Me? I was an expressive and verbose, bilingual child, who wrote a lot of stories and competed in, and won, public speaking contests (in both languages). I excelled in school and was a straight A student, who was (and still is) very fit and loved participating sports. I went into a highly competitive architecture program, before going back into the performing arts using my architecture skills to major in production design for theatre and film. And yes, close to family.
Ronald was a child stage actor who did just fine in school and was a fit, wiry kid. He got his university degree in fine arts and is a multi-instrumentalist and accomplished composer. He ran his family’s theatre school for several years, before leaving to be the artist in residence at another post-secondary institution. He still teaches. He’s close to his family (including the alcoholic) and is getting married.
His younger brother, Donald, was a child film actor and had a recurring role in a well-known TV series (still on TV in some parts). He played football for a champion university football team then auditioned for the National Theatre School in the UK. Nowadays, he’s got a small page on IMDB, but is mainly a stage actor in both Canada and the UK. Not bad for a kid who’s supposed to be lousy at expressing himself and unable to fit in to team sports.
Anne’s father was a raging alcoholic. Due to domestic violence she ran away from home. Student welfare and a part-time job got her through high school, then she got a second job to put herself through university to get a degree in mechanical engineering. She’s back in engineering now after taking two years off to go overseas where she worked as a screenwriter on two feature films. She is not close to her family since she’d likely be the victim of an “honour killing” if they could track her down.
We’re supposed to have been shy, intellectually and culturally inept klutzes, unable to sort out difficult concepts or form bonds with our peers. Oh, and stats tell us we’re also supposed to be alcoholics too. None of us have substance abuse issues and we seem to have come out just fine both as kids and as “traumatized” adults.
Maybe you’re laboring under a defensive misconception. In one useful model describing an alcoholic family system the siblings may be divided into four different roles each playing a part in helping the family cope with the stress.
One of those roles is the Hero Child. Sounds like you and your friends subscribed to that choice.
Good for you for coming out “just fine” and may you continue to do so.
Eats_Crayons, good on you, but remember that statistics
come up with averages, with very few people bothering to describe ranges,
are often performed by people who do not understand stats in the first place,
the way the math is used, often do not differentiate properly groups which are essentially different (it’s just a WAG, but perhaps the children are affected differently when the money spent on booze has a noticeable impact on family finances and when it does not, for example)
I can give you counter anecdata to yours: my cousins. My mother’s sister is an alcoholic (she’s now dry and claiming she never, ever touched alcohol; both her and Mom are very keen on appearances and the first people they lie to is themselves): this is the aunt who talked with her eldest daughter on the phone every day after leaving her (14) and her brother (10) under the tender care of He Who Tried To Have Sex With His (Grand)Daughters And Pimp (Grand)Children Of Both Genders Out and of his wife, in whose eyes Gramps could do no wrong. She-cousin dropped out of school at 18, He-cousin didn’t even get his Compulsory. She now has a college degree, having taken the “GED” at 35. He did jail time for selling drugs. Are they typical of children of alcoholics, or typical of grandchildren of grandparents from hell? How much of my aunt’s alcoholism and man-dependency came from having those parents? That level of detail is beyond the studies that go into those kinds of statistics.
Depends on the kid, I guess. I fit into just one of those (not too close with the family) while my brother fits into all three, easily. I think a lot of it depends on the character of the person, not solely the environmental situation. I grew up to be the “Hero child” (dad once told me that I help by making the family look normal if a random stranger was to meet me) while my brother was just kind of…all over the place and not doing too well in life, to be honest.
See? This is exactly the attitude that drove me nuts as a kid. “You are supposed to have symptoms X, Y, and Z. Don’t have those symptoms? Well, that’s a symptom too!” I had no siblings, BTW, I “subscribed” to no role, I did whatever came naturally as I explored the world. And I screwed up plenty too, as much as any other kid.
The faulty premise of “you did this to cope!” is the assumption that there was any real NEED to “cope” at all. Not all alcoholics fit the stereotype of a violent loser on welfare, who passes out on the front lawn. Both my father and Ron and Don’s were very similar in their ways. They were both very highly educated intellectuals who were heavily involved in arts and literature and who ruined their careers with alcohol (my father was a professor of Renaissance literature until the early 1970s, then he was essentially unemployed until he died in the late 1990s Edit: He died of a throat cancer you get from drinking and smoking. Look up Michael Douglas’s cancer.). How did their addiction manifest? They holed up in their study/workshop working endlessly and quite quietly on “very important projects”, with no results that anyone ever saw. The only real stressor was if you somehow disrupted their work and they had a tantrum like a child. Otherwise, if not for the smell of cigarette smoke, you’d forget they were even there.
As a result, it was much more like living in a single-parent family with a grumpy neighbour that you’d leave be. The very worst we had to cope with on a day-to-day basis was indifference from someone we didn’t really know well anyway - oh, the horror! Our respective accomplishments as children and young adults reflects mainly on the fact that we had strong capable parenting from our strong capable and very independent mothers, who were also the bread winners. Our mothers encouraged all of our interests.
My father was an alcoholic long before I was born, but I had no idea at all until I was 14 and he got his second DUI. I never knew about the first DUI or his night in jail. That’s how invisible his “problem” was. I had no idea. I just thought he was a weird guy obsessed with research/writing a book. Anne’s father was more the typical raging jerk. I don’t think she was trying to be a hero either, she just wanted to get out, and had no trouble at all abandoning her sister and mother saying: “They could leave too, but if they aren’t then that’s their problem.” Not particularly heroic. She didn’t form any kind of “coping unit” with her older sister. She just thought her sister was an idiot for not leaving too.
Small detail: Both my father and Ron 'n Don’s drank in secret. My father really ONLY drank in secret and kept his bottle hidden behind a bookshelf in his off-limits study. He died when I was 25 and in my entire life, I never saw him drink alcohol. Not once. I used to think my parents were both teetotalers. One hot day at a family BBQ, when I saw my mother get a half-cup of beer, I thought it was positively scandalous!
See? This is exactly the attitude that drove me nuts as a kid. “You are supposed to have symptoms X, Y, and Z. Don’t have those symptoms? Well, that’s a symptom too!” I had no siblings, BTW, I “subscribed” to no role, I did whatever came naturally as I explored the world. And I screwed up plenty too, as much as any other kid.
The faulty premise of “you did this to cope!” is the assumption that there was any real NEED to “cope” at all. Not all alcoholics fit the stereotype of a violent loser on welfare, who passes out on the front lawn.
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Be careful not to confuse symptoms with coping mechanisms. One describes disease and the other describes the best choices that a child can select in his home life.
We all have developed coping mechanisms for dealing with family members and their various behaviors. And we carry these into our adult lives where some of them serve us well and others of them become problematic.
I doubt any one of us could survive to adulthood, regardless of how “normal” our childhoods were, without learning ways to cope.
That isn’t a judgement of strengths or weaknesses. It just is.
I’m glad that you emphasized the fact that sometimes addiction exists when it isn’t apparent to anyone.
