How Many Children Live with Heavy Drinkers Across 19 European Countries?

Ilona Tamutienė and Daumantas Stumbrys
Vytautas Magnus University

Abstract

How Many Children Live with Heavy Drinkers across 19 European Countries? Ilona Tamutienė, Daumantas Stumbrys Vytautas Magnus University Background: Alcohol’s harm from others drinking is well documented by researchers in different countries and in different cultural background across the world. Studies of child welfare have highlighted heavy parental alcohol use as crucial factor for a child’s normal physical, emotional and social development. In order to prevent harmful childhood experiences, improve individual and public health and sustainable development, it is necessary to develop prevention and interventions to reduce alcohol-related harm to children. This requires knowing the scale of the problem. To the authors knowledge it is unknown how many children live with heavy drinkers in Europe. This study examined the prevalence of children living with at least one heavy alcohol user in the household in 19 European countries. Method: The data from Standardized European Alcohol Survey project (RARHA SEAS) and Eurostat was used to calculate prevalence of children living within a household with at least one heavy drinker. A four-item version of the Rapid Alcohol Problems Screen test developed by Cherpitel (2000) was applied. Descriptive statistics analysis was conducted with SPSS. The average number of children living in a household in 2015 came from the Eurostat database. Results: The overall percentage of children growing up with heavy drinkers in all countries surveyed was 16.81%, for a total of 9,740,901 children in 19 European countries. The large gaps of prevalence of children living with heavy drinker were identified between different European countries. The lowest proportion of children living in a household with the heavy drinker were in Italy - 5.59%, while it has reached 35.23 % in Lithuania. Conclusions: The sound number of children living in the households with heavy drinker calling for further strategies to prevent child exposures to heavy drinking environments. This research was funded by a grant (No. S-MIP-20-2) from the Research Council of Lithuania.


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