Family stress can lead to drinking

Press, 26 October 1982, Page 20

Family stress can lead to drinking

BARBARA STEWART

concludes her series

on women and problem drinking.

A great many of the stresses placed on women directly relate to society's role expectations of women. This is particularly so for the child bearing/mother role. Domestic stress is given as precipitating problem drinking much more frequently by women than by men. When a woman has a drinking problem she is going to affect her family system. Anything that interferes with the woman's very central role in the family as the pivot around which the husband, the children, and the household revolve brings disturbing changes. Men are often reluctant to get help for their wives.

There are responses of denial, anger, shame, and a sense of impotence because they cannot control their wives’ drinking. This domestic crisis can simmer far too long behind the chintz or velvet curtains, hidden from public eyes and possible help. Often the family will become disrupted earlier if it’s the mother s rather than the father’s drinking problem. Like women and alcohol, these days there is a lot more awareness about what is happening to the children in these situations. Daryl Deering, counsellor at the Christchurch Alcohol and Drug Dependence Centre feels that up to this time children have not been very effectively helped.

bringing friends home, not knowing how their mother is going to be from day to day. The inconsistencies can be quite tremendous for them. Often these worries are

Groups exist such as Al Anon and Alateen, which are geared particularly towards children of problem drinkers. But there is definitely a lot more yet to be achieved. We are now much more aware of the problems, but in terms of specific treatment strategies there is not a lot of help available. Parents are so wound up in their own problems that they either cannot see their children’s confusion and reactions. or grant to the children an understanding that they may or may not have. Often the children get caught in the middle. They have divided loyalties and conflicts. The mum who is drinking is a very different mum from the sober one. Children worry about

not spoken of, just locked deeply inside. Behaviour problems at school can point to troubles at home. Signs of neglect can take the form of truancy from school, thieving, disappearing from home. If the mother is separated or divorced then her struggles with herself as well as with children are all the more agonising, lonely, and at times seemingly impossible to resolve. An alcohol problem related to women, of which the severity has only recently been appreciated, is the foetal alcohol syndrome. These days doctors are warning women that if possible they should not drink at all during pregnancy, and preferably not shortly before conception if it is planned. There is no recommended safe dosage. Some say it is

two drinks a aay. some say that for a woman not to drink except for an occasional night out might be worse than the regular two drinks a day. A particularly risky time for irreversible damage to the foetus is in the first stages of pregnancy. The foetus has no defence against alcohol. Therefore with severe or prolonged exposure to alcohol in the mother's body the effects can range from mild but nevertheless impairing, to extremely serious, on the rapidly growing tissues of the foetal brain and other vital organs. Teen-age girls and women need constant educational information about their responsibilities to themselves and their own lives, and the lives of the next generation, to which they will give birth.