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Children talking to ChildLine about parental alcohol and drug misuse

August 2010

ChildLine Casenotes is a series of reports based on analysis of calls to ChildLine, a free confidential helpline for children and young people in the UK provided by the NSPCC.

Children talking to ChildLine about parental alcohol and drug misuse (PDF, 267KB) is our latest report, based on detailed analysis of calls to ChildLine from April 2008 to March 2009.

Key findings

• Children who were counselled by ChildLine about their parents’¹ alcohol and drug misuse often also talked about their experiences of physical abuse, family relationship problems, neglect and sexual abuse.
  
  
• Children talked about being worried, frightened and confused by their parents’ alcohol and drug misuse.
  
  
• Children often took on a caring role and saw it as their responsibility to solve their parents’ alcohol and drug misuse problems.
  
  
• Almost twice the number of children were counselled by ChildLine about their parents’ alcohol misuse than about drug misuse.
  
  
• Children who were cared for by habitual alcohol or drug users could be inducted to rely on alcohol and drugs in order to cope with life’s challenges.

1. Throughout this report we use the terms 'parents' and 'parental' interchangeably to mean either or both parent(s), carers and others with parental responsibility. This person is usually the child’s mother or father.

Children talking to ChildLine about parental alcohol and drug misuse (PDF, 267KB)

Related reading

Seeing and hearing the child: rising to the challenge of parental substance misuse / Children’s voices: living with parental substance misuse
Parental substance misuse can cause serious harm to children at every age, from conception to adulthood, yet their needs have often remained unseen and unmet. These two standalone, but complementary, NSPCC training resources have been developed to equip mainstream children's and adult services to identify and respond appropriately to the needs of these children.

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