How Alcohol Effected My Children
Why do parents drink alcohol and use drugs in front of their young children? The answer is that we the parents do not realize that we are really giving the okay to our children to use drugs and alcohol, and we are too stupid to realize how are children are going to be effected by our stupidity in their future.
These children are so young and they idolize us as parents and want to be like their parents in every way. They look up to us, love us, and respect us, after all we have brought them into this world as clean and pour little babies.
They see us drinking and using drugs so what do you think they would think? They see us doing it so they say to themselves, it must be alright to do, after all, my mom and dad do it.
Not a very good way to bring up such innocent children into addicted environment caused by us the parents. No one wants alcoholism in a family.
Back in my days of alcohol abuse my children watched me each and everyday come home from work and say hello to everyone and head right to the refrigerator and crack open the first of many beers.
They probably thought to themselves, wow, my dad goes to work everyday and then when he gets home he starts to drink alcohol for the rest of the night. We don't know and will never know what our children are thinking to themselves when they are very young. They are by far not stupid and they just look around and take everything in that they hear and see.
This of course is all my opinion only, but maybe others might feel the same as I do. My wife never drank alcohol and got very upset when I would drink in front of our children. She would call me on it many times, but I never paid attention to her because.....I thought that our children were too young to understand and realize what I was doing.
As the years went by and I continued to drink and carry on my same old routine, my children became older and wiser, and started to realize and see on their own what exactly I was doing.
When they became old enough to start going out and driving they seemed to have been going out earlier all the time and coming home later. I always would ask them where are you heading to now and the answer would be the same, "just going out".
As they both moved out and started their own lives neither of them did drugs or alcohol. I am really shocked that they saw me drinking all those years and they never started the filthy habit that I had.
My daughter just graduated college with a BA degree in Communications and part of her schooling was that she had to design a web site from scratch. She wrote the web site to be about Crushing Alcoholism A Family Story. I told her it was fine to write about my addiction and what my family went through all those years.
When I read that article on the Internet I really felt so bad and very sad that I effected my wife and children in a way that I was blinded to see, when it was right in front of my eyes. I was embarrassed and ashamed of what I had done.
I finally got the answer that I would always ask for years which was, "where are you heading to now"? The answer that I found in the article was, they went out so much (to get away from me). Well that hit me like a ton of bricks when I read those words. I thought how sad can this be when my own children actually hid from me and keep their friends away from me due to their embarrassment of their father's addiction.
So the message I am trying to give is that if you have small children and you drink alcohol or do drugs please do it in your own privacy and away from your child's sight because it will come back to haunt you in future years and you might find out something you never knew as I did.
My wife and I were one of the fortunate parents that our children didn't follow in the footsteps of their daddy.
This is only a word of wisdom to people that openly drink in front of their young children As I Did.
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© 2010 Mark Bruno