A Danish study involving a cohort of nearly 85,000 children, followed from age 13 to 27, looked at the long-term consequences of parental alcohol abuse, identified through alcohol abuse related hospital admissions (Christoffersen & Soothill, 2003). Parental alcohol abuse was found to be a risk factor for other disadvantages including premature death, suicide attempts, drug addiction, mental illness and teenage motherhood, and for certain life experiences including parental violence and family separation.

Much research has focused on the development of alcoholism in the children themselves, who are at a 2-10 fold increased risk compared to children who do not have a parent with an alcohol problem (Lieberman, 2000). For example, Thompson et al. (2008) found that in a survey of over 43,000 adults in the USA, those with parental history of alcohol problems were more likely to have experienced alcohol-dependence themselves than those who had no history of parental alcohol problems (23.1% compared to 9.6%). Similarly, in a recent cross-sectional study of over 3000 young adults in France, people with alcohol-dependent parents were almost twice as likely to be dependent on alcohol or cannabis themselves compared to people with no history of parental alcohol dependence (Melchior et al., 2011). Other studies have focused on drinking during adolescence, when many of our health-related habits are formed; for example, Chalder et al. (2006) surveyed over 1700 adolescents aged 13-15 in Wales and found that children of parents with alcohol problems were more likely to report drinking two or more alcoholic drinks per week than children of parents without alcohol problems (22.8% compared to 16.5%), to have been drunk in the last 3 months (44.0% compared to 35.7%) and to expect to be drunk during the next 2 weeks (18.2% compared to 11.1%). These children also showed differences in their reported reasons for drinking, with more children of parents with alcohol problems reporting drinking ‘to forget their problems’ (15.8% compared to 6.4%) and ‘to get drunk’ (21.1% compared to 12.0%) and fewer reporting that they drank because they liked the taste of alcoholic drinks (32.0% compared to 47.9%). In a large, nationally representative study in the USA, young people aged 12-17 with an alcohol-dependent parent were more likely to have used alcohol, tobacco and marijuana in the past 12 months (Obot et al., 2001).
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