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had not made a mistake that day; her father had. She had told him she was going to the cul-de-sac and he did not remember, and that is what stung the worst. As psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most, and this applies to adults as much as to punish children; it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”
Emily and her brothers spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the twin beds in the boys’ room, moping about their backsides and about the unreasonableness of it all. They would have liked to have gone back outside with the other kids they heard shrieking in fun, but they were too afraid to anger their father again, and too embarrassed to show their tearstained faces.
“Is Daddy an alcoholic?” asked Emily.
“That’s a bad word,” one of her brothers shot back. “You shouldn’t say that.”
It would be two decades before Emily would piece together in therapy that, yes, her father had been an alcoholic all along. Until that time, she had no real way of understanding why her family was the way it was, or why her shoulders came up around her ears at the sight of a man taking off his belt. Well into adulthood, that jingling, snapping sound made her shiver. So did the sound of liquid pouring, the way it went glub, glub, glub out of a bottle made of glass.
***
One in four children lives with an alcoholic. Alcoholism is the most common illness a child is likely to see a parent suffer from, though most of these children do not know quite what it is they are seeing. Part of the trouble is that it is difficult to recognize an illness if you do not know what the symptoms are. So here is the list, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition—commonly known as the DSM-5. An “alcohol use disorder”—the current medical term for alcoholism—is a pattern of use that meets two or more of the following criteria: often drinking more than was intended; unsuccessful efforts to cut down or quit drinking; spending a great deal of time obtaining, consuming, or recovering from alcohol; a strong desire or urge to drink; drinking that interferes with responsibilities at work or at home; interpersonal problems caused by drinking; giving up other activities to drink; using alcohol in dangerous situations such as driving; drinking continues despite health, occupational, or social problems caused by alcohol; tolerance to alcohol, or a need to drink more and more; withdrawal from alcohol, or physical discomfort when abstaining for long periods. To meet two or three of these criteria is to have a “mild” alcohol use disorder. Having four to five symptoms qualifies as a “moderate” case, and six or more symptoms suggests the disorder is “severe.”
Drinking and even problem drinking can seem too commonplace to have serious consequences, yet when considering the years of life lost to ill health, disability, or early death, alcoholism is the second most burdensome mental disorder in the developed world, topped only by depression. Problem drinkers are likely to suffer from an array of related health problems, to lose their jobs and their relationships, and even to die an early death. But make no mistake: Those hurt most by alcoholism are not the problem drinkers, they are the children of problem drinkers. While alcoholism can cut an adult’s life short, problem drinking in the home undermines child development from the start.
Children of alcoholics lead different lives than their friends, and they are likely to face multiple adversities at once. Mothers or fathers, or both, can be alcoholics, but because men are twice as likely to be problem drinkers as women, the most typical stressor children live with is violence, particularly directed toward the mother. An estimated 60 percent of domestic violence cases occur when a parent has been drinking, and 30 percent of child abuse cases involve a parent who is under the influence of alcohol. Even children who are never struck by a parent are still likely to be “hurt on the inside” in myriad ways. Compared with their peers, children of alcoholics are doubly at risk for verbal abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, mental illness in the home, parental separation or divorce, economic hardship, and having a family member in jail. Because mothers tend to be the primary caretakers of children in both intact and divorced families, some research suggests that life at home may be especially difficult if the mother is an alcoholic. When mothers drink, children are less likely to be fed and cared for in even the most basic ways. When fathers drink, some mothers attempt to buffer their children by protecting them from the consequences or simply by limiting their exposure.
Ironically, one of the ways families try to limit their children’s exposure to alcoholism is by not talking about it. When life feels very scary, parents, like their children, often go silent, too. They try to keep on behaving as usual as they hide their problems from friends and relatives, and even from themselves. In his memoir, Not My Father’s Son, actor Alan Cumming writes about how his family responded to his alcoholic father: “We never actually addressed what was really going on: that we were living with a tyrant, someone who, I believe now, was mentally ill. As our silence grew, so did our denial.” This is not unusual. According to educational materials from the Hazelden Foundation written especially for children, having a parent who is an alcoholic can be like having “an elephant in the living room”: “People have to go through the living room many times a day and you watch as they walk through it very . . . carefully . . . around . . . the . . . ELEPHANT. No one ever says anything about the ELEPHANT. They avoid the swinging trunk and just walk around it. Since no one ever talks about the ELEPHANT, you know that you’re not supposed to talk about it either. And you don’t.”
Lots of children, not just children of alcoholics, grow up with elephants in their lives: physical abuse, mental illness, neglect, poverty, sexual abuse, abandonment, divorce, domestic violence. Whatever it is, most children are too scared and too confused to talk about it—and besides, they notice that others would prefer they didn’t. Left alone with complicated grown-up problems, young minds draw their own conclusions about the world.
***
When the elephant came home from work in the evenings, he sat down in the living room and drank brown drink after brown drink. Emily liked to sit on the edges of the room, watching television from behind some drapes like a little mouse. The more Emily’s father drank, the more her brothers wrestled on the floor during commercials. “Pipe down!” yelled Emily’s father. “Go to bed!” he shouted when the family programming ended. “We’re hungry!” the twins demanded. “It’s not a school night! It’s summer!” they stalled. When the elephant got out of his chair and charged the boys, this was Emily’s cue to scurry off to bed.
From her room, Emily heard four-way shouting as bedtime came and went. Her brothers hurled refusals and challenges. Her mother pleaded for her father to let her handle the boys, or maybe even for him to stop drinking and go to bed himself. Many times, this worked. Sometimes, it did not. On this particular night, Emily heard the noises of a fight turning physical. Grunts and slaps. Boys crying. Her mother shrieking. As annoyed as she was afraid, Emily got out of bed and walked toward the noise, ready to perform. Upon entering the living room, she saw one brother standing on a chair with her mother blocking the way to him, fending off her husband by sticking out both arms and a leg. Her father leaned in toward mother and son, leading with his elbow, the back of his hand ready to follow with a good smack. From her father’s other hand, the other twin was hanging heavy, dangling by his arm held hard and fast in his father’s too-tight grip. Emily could see red finger marks where the brother had twisted and struggled and gained an inch or two.
When parents lose control, some children try to be heroes by taking charge themselves. Older children may try to reason with their parents, while the younger ones shift the focus to their own silly or bad behavior, as Emily’s brothers did; or, like Emily, they distract their parents with seemingly innocent misdirection. Pretending to be half asleep and much confused, Emily asked for some juice and the action stopped. Her father dropped one brother and backed away from the other, and then he stomped upstairs and slammed his bedroom door. Emily’s mom sent the brothers to bed. She poured Emily something to drink and sent her back to bed, too. When Emily heard her mother turn off the television, Emily turned toward the task of falling asleep. Asking for juice was an old trick.
The next morning, the twins had bruises and marks on their arms, so Emily was sent to swim team practice without them. She pedaled