Social fears may raise alcoholism risk

Science News, April 10, 1999 by B. Bower

Much research has noted that outgoing children who impulsively misbehave, bully others, and get into numerous fights have more than their share of alcohol problems as young adults. A new study suggests that kids in families with widespread alcoholism may tend to find themselves on the other side of the temperamental coin--withdrawing and clamming up when confronted with unfamiliar people and situations. Such children may also gravitate toward alcoholism, the researchers suggest.

"Children from alcoholic families may be at greater risk for displaying a behaviorally inhibited temperament," says a team led by psychologist Shirley Y. Hill of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "While the childhood risks associated with [poorly controlled behavior] are well known and more prominent among children from alcoholic families, the risks associated with extreme inhibition are less well studied."

Hill and her coworkers examined 36 white children, 4 to 6 year olds living in middle-class households. Half the children came from families in which about one-quarter of the members, from the past several generations, had suffered from alcohol dependency with no other psychiatric disorders. The remaining youngsters came from families with few or no cases of alcoholism or any other mental ailments.

Accompanied by a parent, each child attended from one to three sessions in a playroom. Experimenters videotaped and rated children's behavior as they had opportunities to play with an unfamiliar child of the same age and sex.

Children from the families with high rates of alcoholism displayed far more inhibition during play sessions than their counterparts did, reports Hill's team in the April Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Inhibition appeared mainly as a pronounced tendency to stare at the other child while refusing to play with or to speak to him or her.

Some children from high-alcoholism families may experience sensitized biological reactions to stress that foster inhibition, the researchers theorize, and as adolescents, may use alcohol to quell anxiety. Other studies find that kids in families with pervasive alcohol problems often develop alcoholism.

Further studies should explore possible biological influences on these unusually inhibited kids as well as the psychological effects of living with an alcoholic parent, the researchers add.

Childhood inhibition merits "attention and concern" as an influence on alcoholism, remarks psychiatric epidemiologist Naimah Z. Weinberg of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Rockville, Md., in a published comment in the same journal. However, evidence for this link remains sparse, Weinberg says.

Subtle language disorders may contribute to the inhibition of some children from families with many alcoholic members, she proposes.