How some witches talk family alcohol abuse

It's for me, not for thee, and actually it's not for me either. Good luck!

Here’s a question I got from a reader awhile back:

How do sober witches talk to their children about alcohol use? My husband is an alcoholic who has been sober for more than 5 years and my kids are 10 and 7. They know he doesn’t drink alcohol and that he goes to meetings and we’ve had a few talks about how he can’t control his drinking so he doesn’t drink at all. (I am a couple of glasses of wine on the weekend drinker.) As my kids get older and closer to the age where my husband and I both started experimenting with drinking (14-15) I am wondering how to share with them their family history in a way that conveys the seriousness of the situation, without making it more enticing as a rebellious phase. 

I asked a few witchy readers I know who have been there to share their experiences with their kids. Many thanks to them for sharing so honestly. Please note that none of this is prescriptive; it is just how some parents approach this particular complicated aspect of raising kids:

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I am a fellow witch whose husband is a recovering alcoholic. Both of his paternal grandfathers were alcoholics who died of alcohol-related diseases.

We have a daughter, 10, who is aware of her dad’s recovery because we are open about how he gave it up and why. When he was giving up, sometimes they had a code word for when he just needed to walk away because the numbing effects of alcohol were no longer available.

I have a lot of learned experience as I went off to get therapy and joined Al-Anon to work through some stuff (anxiety management = hyper-vigilance and control) to get through the transition. We are a much happier family, but it is and can be a lot.

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My kids are 10 years old and a freshman in high school. I stopped drinking before I met my husband. I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous.

My husband still drinks, but he doesn’t drink a lot because he doesn’t keep alcohol in the house. When the kids were little, I had this dread that we were going to have to have this conversation about why we don’t drink. As someone who had an addictive personality, there’s a little bit of fear that some of this could be passed on either genetically or nature vs nurture.

I tried to let the cat out of the bag slowly in terms of giving my son a little bit of information. The general message is that I used to drink, and I don’t anymore because it was a bad habit for me.

I’ve said over the years, “I want you guys, once you’re older, to keep an eye on it for yourselves because this is in the family.” More recently, my son told me in middle school that there were kids who were vaping and using drugs at school. It wasn’t really in his social circle until the summer after 8th grade when a bunch of the girls he hung out with in his friend group started drinking and vaping.

We’ve told him we think he's too young at this point to even dabble in any of these things. We understand that there might be curiosity, but from a brain development standpoint, we feel like he’s too young, and we don’t want him to be doing that right now. We didn’t want to be too in the gray area about we’re not coming down hard in terms of consequences: our expectation for now is that we’d like you to avoid that. Stick with kids who are not doing that.

What I’m hearing is that socializing is still happening with people who might be bringing alcohol to the hangouts, maybe alcohol that they got at their parent’s house and have in some container. It sounds like there is some drinking around him when he is getting together with larger groups of people.

He’s been pretty honest with us. I know that it bothers him to some extent, and he and some of his closest friends have agreed, for now, for this year, not to drink. I don’t think he has any interest in vaping, but drinking probably seems a little more in reach for him. 

We have said that if he’s ever in a situation, to call us, and we won’t ask questions. I have to sometimes remind myself of that. We can just pick him up wherever he needs to be and he doesn’t want to talk about it, he doesn’t have to.

The one part I find a little tricky is the balance of other parents who are in your kids’ social circle. Some like to talk a lot to each other about what they’re hearing, and from my perspective, if my son is telling me something in confidence, I try not to betray that. Some parents say, “I’ll let you know if I hear of anything.” I don’t feel comfortable doing that.

I know who the “look the other way” parents are: it’s usually because there’s an older sibling. The way I’ve handled it with my son is there have only been a few times where I have let him go somewhere where he thinks that the parent might not be home. And in those situations, I’ve let him know what we expect—if you’re going to this house where there isn’t a parent home, we expect you’re not going to be drinking. We do want you to call us if you’re feeling uncomfortable.

I like to describe the behavior and the condition more than the word “alcoholic.” From my point of view, he knew I was going to AA meetings when he was little. I want him to understand that alcohol can make you feel really good, and this is why people use it.

You have to be careful because if you find that you’re one of these people who craves it or feels like they need it or if you’re using alcohol or vaping or drugs to cope with bad feelings, those are the topics that I feel it’s my job to cover with him. I think he knows I used alcohol to mask depression, to suppress bad feelings to get through hard things. If he understands that there are alternatives and what those coping strategies are, that, to me, is more important than letting him understand what recovery is. There are other options for handling depression and bad feelings.

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I’m a recovering alcoholic with an 8-year-old. She goes to meetings with me, so we’ve definitely had conversations about what it means to be an alcoholic. She understands it as a sickness that I (and everyone else in the room) have. We’ve had conversations about how it makes me sick, how it might be genetic, anonymity and why alcoholism is stigmatized, among other things.

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I stopped drinking near the tail end of the pandemic when I realized I had alcohol abuse issues I couldn’t keep ignoring. I started with a 100-day dry stint to see what would happen and just kept going.

My kids (9 and 12) are into my sobriety and like checking my app to see how many days I have. Sometimes when we’re going to a place where I have a sense memory of drinking, where it kind of hits me, the alternate reality I used to live, I ask “Should I start drinking again tonight?” The kids used to go, “No!” but now they’re like, “Why do you keep asking that?”

They know what “drunk” is because they’ve seen people stagger around and be sick. I’ve talked about how their uncle or grandparents might have had a few drinks when they’re acting loud (uncle) or fuzzy/emotional (grandparents.) When they get older, I do want to talk with them more about the normalization of drinking in lower-key social situations (family dinners, the nightly cocktail hour drink), which I think can get downplayed as less dangerous compared to more over-the-top examples of hard drinking, but still can sneak up on you, especially in our family.

The hard part is that they’re at a sort of holier-than-thou age where they don’t understand why you’d do anything that makes you ill (although that stage is probably ending very soon for my older kid.) My husband does drink, and I’ve heard my younger son say, “You’re getting drunk, Dad,” if my husband orders a second beer. It annoys him, and I don’t do a great job stepping up to say, “Stop hassling your dad,” to be honest. I haven’t figured out how to defend him as a parent but not defend the habit.

It’s going to get tricky as they get older, for sure. I try to point out how commercials for booze sell this image of everyone having fun and looking a certain way (attractive, young, healthy, happy) that doesn’t represent reality at all. I hope to instill discussions about safety above all else. I want to have conversations along the lines of “I know abstinence may not be practical but I hope you don’t get arrested, hurt yourself, hurt anyone else, or end up in the hospital. Here are some tactics for doing this in a safer way. Please remember alcohol is a poison so if you’re going to take the poison, don’t do it in the most deadly way.” I don’t want them to think they can’t talk to me about it or that I wouldn’t support them if they needed it, but I do hope that they see me having made the decision to stop and still living my life and know it’s a feasible option.

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Both of my kids are aware that my father, their grandfather, lived with alcohol addiction and that it’s a complicating factor in my life as an adult, and their 23-year-old cousin just finished a stint in rehab. So, we’ve had various discussions about addiction, but I could probably do a better job of directly sharing my experiences. I’ve struggled with how much and what exactly to share with them and others over the years. 

I recently gave this book to my 15-year old son, and he surprisingly read it within days (usually takes him longer to get through a book): High: Everything You Want to Know About Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction. I highly recommend this book for teens! These authors are fantastic — David and Nic Scheff — the movie Beautiful Boy is based on their combined memoirs. 

My son said the book is “depressing” but also “interesting.” He has shared with me that he is aware of peers who have started drinking and vaping on the weekends at parties, but he wants nothing to do with this sort of thing. As a result, he doesn’t do much socializing outside of school and stays home a lot. Maybe that is just fine. One part of the book that we talked about is the recommendation to develop a plan if you do not want to drink at a party. The authors recommend you plan with an adult to text a codeword that you could use while at the party that would signal the adult to call your phone and say that you have to leave now and will be picked up. We agreed on a codeword and a plan for a party that he was set to go to, but then he ended up not going after all.

It was a good experience to help him think through how he might address this issue of denying a drink at a social event. I appreciated that he trusted me enough to even have the conversation about the plan. I would not have thought about this if it wasn’t for the book. 

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From Emily Gould, essayist and advice columnist at the Cut:

My older son is 8.75 years old.  He knows that I don’t drink alcohol and that his dad does and that other adults do. He doesn’t understand yet what alcohol is or what it does.

We haven’t had a substantive conversation about it. We’ve talked about addiction in the sense that we talk about all the different things and been open about the things we are addicted to like Dada is addicted to looking at his phone, Mama is addicted to vaping, Raffi is addicted to Roblox, his brother is addicted to being perfect.

I foresee it to be a thing we talk about more. We’ve done a little bit of therapy with him. I’ve gone to some sessions with him with a child therapist, and it was very messy and painful, but it was good to have a safe place where my son could just be really angry with me and say really mean things to me that I don’t think he would have said in any context.

When the issue of the magazine [where I wrote about alcohol abuse and being in crisis] arrived at our house, I flipped it open to my article, and Raffi was like, “Did you write something? Let me see it.” I had this visceral response where I was like, “Absolutely not.” I pushed it down to the very bottom of the trash can. I threw the salmon wrappers on top of it so it would be as disgusting as possible, and he would not be tempted to dig it out of the garbage. He’s not at all ready to deal with any of that stuff yet. He’s going to be older, inevitably, I imagine spending a lot of time in therapy talking about this.

There are many reasons why people choose to drink alcohol. He absolutely understands addiction. He is addicted to Roblox. His plan was that he was going to deliberately watch YouTube videos instead. He’s trying moderation. It seemed pretty mature. 

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From A.J. Daulerio, who publishes

The Small Bow

, which frequently covers addiction and recovery:

My oldest son is 6. I don’t think he has any concept of what drugs and alcohol are. But they do teach homelessness at his school because it’s so prevalent. He understands what that is, and he understands that people are sick in a way that’s more advanced than I was taught.

Even though I’m working in this [recovery] space, I’m still ill-equipped to talk about it with kids. I think that a lot of these discussions should start with a therapist. I don’t think it’s just drugs and alcohol that will be the first things that appear in someone’s life. It’s going to be emotional stuff. Every kid will be tormented by stuff we were not. It’s just how it is. I think that’s where the first conversation is happening. Whatever is wrong internally is going to drive people to drink. 

It’s going to start earlier for those kids. I truly believe that. Just having a mental health plan in place is what needs to happen. A lot of that [substance] stuff I struggled with is because I kept it inside, and I didn’t want my parents to yell at me. Even when I was in my 20s and struggling with cocaine, they were like, “Get the fuck out of the family; you’ll never work again.”

Our brains are a lot different than when we grew up because of the fucking [smart]phone. We have to think of the phone as the worst bad influence that has replaced the dirtbag neighbor.

To sum up and answer the question, the parent needs to have that conversation early with a therapist. There needs to be a plan in place. I don’t think it’s going to be a birds and the bees special episode situation that exists. It’s too complex. It really is.

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