Shame about the children: A legacy of distress for adults who have grown up with parental problem drinking and family disharmony?

This study examined whether disharmony within one's family of origin is a risk factor for the children of problem drinkers in adult life. The responses to a postal questionnaire of 39 adults who experienced difficulties in childhood around parental drinking were assessed for any associations that existed between their remembering disharmony (between their parents, between their parents and themselves, and within the family generally) in their childhood and their current experience of shame as measured by the Experience of Shame Scale (Andrews, Qian, & Valentine, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2002, 41, 29-42). Shame vulnerability was therefore assumed to be representative of adult distress. The participants were attracted to the study by advertisements placed in the Manchester Evening News and Big Issue in the North. The analyses used in this study were the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test and the Spearman correlation coefficient test. Disharmony did emerge as being quite significantly associated with increased levels of shame. This study therefore concluded that any serious strategy to deal with problem drinking must address the destructive impact that such disharmony has for these children, both as children and in their adult life.