Alcoholism and Its Effect on the Family Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Alcoholism and Its Effect on the Family - Essay ExampleThe alcohol that is carried from the mother into the placenta reaches the baby inside the uterus thereby introducing the mother to the risk of giving birth to a baby with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or FAS (Parsons).According to Parsons, babies born with FAS have deformities in the star and skull and are physically shorter and underweight compared to normal babies. Apart from this, they have difficulties in learning, attention span, judgment, memory, problem-solving (Parsons), and usually exhibit behavior problems.These physical and behavioral limitations are carried over to adulthood leading to difficulties in affinity establishment and making these affected children socially impaired and incompetent to live a normal existence.In physically healthy children of alcoholics, learning disorders, behavioral problems and emotional disturbance (Burge & Schneider) are apparent. According to G. Berger, many of them have low self-esteem and carry feelings of loneliness, guilt, helplessness, fears of abandonment and chronic opinion (qtd. in Parsons).These childrens ability to read and learn slows down as alcoholic parents neglect their important role in the family. Moreover, as the home becomes a venue for conflict due to constant arguments about the issue of excessive drinking, the home becomes no longer conducive to study and learning. According to Ferguson, as performance in the school gets adversely affected, children experience problems academically and have difficulty establishing relationships with teachers and classmates (Parsons) thereby resulting to feelings of inadequacy and isolation.Other children manifest behavioral problems such as lying, stealing, fighting, and truancy (Parsons). This is mainly due to the extremely unstable home environment (Parsons) they live in. As children can non predict the behaviour of the problem drinker (Walker) in the family or know not what to expect from an alcoholic pare nt, they develop erratic behaviors and become unpredictable themselves (Parsons). On MarriageThe attitude of the problem drinker negatively alters as the dependence on alcohol increases. According to Burge and Schneider, excessive alcohol use does not only lead to clinically significant physical impairment as the drinkers health deteriorates, it overly leads to distress as the family gets exposed to common scenarios among alcoholic families such as car accidents due to intoxication or arrests for alcohol-related violations or misconducts (Burge & Schneider). These situations more often than not trigger arguments between spouses and other family members about the risk of intoxication that result to domestic tension.As the alcoholic individual fails to fulfill major obligations at work, relationship between spouses gets affected. For instance, repeated absences or poor work performance related to alcohol use (Burge & Schneider) leads to inefficiency and eventual job loss. Unemploymen t then leads to financial difficulties (Parsons) which is another unnerving domestic issue that couples deal with on a regular basis. Liquor addiction also makes the alcoholic parent neglectful of children or household. Feelings of hatred and self-pity (Parsons) grow as the nonalcoholic spouse feels