6. Conclusion
The major findings of this study are: Heavy maternal drinking is deleteriously related to health consequences for the mother, parenting toward her children, and behavioural and emotional problems in her children. These findings remain, even when highly correlated variables, SES, depression, intact-nonintact status, each also reflecting important results, are controlled.
The family functioning of heavy-drinking mothers, particularly intact families, is seen as more negative. This means that partner communication, control, and affective involvement and responsiveness are problematic. This finding suggests the role of heavy drinking as a significant stressor between couples. Heavy-drinking mothers also smoked more than the other groups and had a concomitant increase in the related diseases of bronchitis and emphysema. The synergy that exists between heavy drinking and smoking, particularly the belief of some sort of algebraic sum of the effects of these drugs which adds to the dual addictiveness, needs to be explored (Pihl et al., l998).
Heavy-drinking mothers find their children more problematic, engage in fewer positive interactions with them, and rate themselves as more hostile and ineffective toward them. These mothers see their children as more emotional/anxious, hyperactive, aggressive, and as displaying more separation anxiety, and as they get even older committing more property crimes than children of mothers in the comparison groups.
This is a profound, consistent, picture of negativity associated with heavy-drinking mothers. It is easy to paint a scenario of how less positive and more negative interactions of the mother would be responsible for the development of her child's problematic behaviour. It is also tempting to paint the heavy-drinking mother in dark disturbed tones. Although both of these explanations are possible, the directionality of the putative mechanisms may well be interactional. That is, difficult child=poor parenting. Bidirectionality of causality has been suggested in a number of studies. Blackson and colleagues (Blackson et al., l996) found that parenting interacted with the child's difficult temperament to increase externalizing and internalizing behaviour problems. In a study of sons of alcoholics, it was those children who showed disruptive behaviour who had mothers who were less militant and demanded obedience (Dobkin et al., l997). Succinctly put, "the child acts; the environment reacts; and the child reacts back in a mutually interlocking-evocative interaction" (Caspi et al., l987, p. 308).
The general confirmatory nature of the mothers' ratings by the teachers' ratings supports the validity of the maternal ratings. Less involved, perhaps negative parenting is suggested by the less interest and support for school seen in heavy-drinking mothers. Of course, teachers were most likely unaware of the drinking habits of any of these parents and thus their ratings can be considered non-biased. Teachers ratings also demonstrated concordance with maternal ratings in finding heavy-drinking offspring more conduct disordered/aggressive and more hyperactive. Finally, both teachers and mothers produced similar significant judgements of negative behaviour on the composite sum-trouble 90th percentile scale.
The l0 and ll year olds who completed this survey did not generally replicate their mothers or teachers ratings on the composite behavioural scales relative to maternal drinking level. They did, however, dramatically do so for intact-nonintact status. Some insights regarding maternal drinking effects can, however, be garnered from the analysis of individual self-report items. Offspring of heavy-drinking mothers reported being more worried about parental stability, were more likely to drink alcohol, be questioned by police, and have trouble getting along with other kids.
Although this study focused on maternal drinking level, the "control" variables of social disadvantage, depression in the mother and the intact-nonintact family status were variables which produced significant findings that interacted with and produced stronger results than the effect of heavy drinking. In particular, family status turned out to be a uniquely powerful and consistent factor across measures and raters. Simply put, nonintact family status can be a very negative state for children. Although how this relationship impacts is not known, the perception, ease, and frequency of shifting relationships is very troubling in light of these and other findings.
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