Is a glass of wine a mom's best friend?

On the playground one day with my own infant, I saw a baby wearing a onesie that said, “Mommy drinks because I cry.”

That’d be funnier if it wasn’t true. An article in Working Mother magazine says, sadly, moms are drinking to handle the stress of motherhood. Alcoholism and drug abuse are way up among working mothers.

Moms having a drink or two (or three, or four…) at the end of a long day isn’t news to anyone who’s on Twitter or Facebook. Kid bedtime rolls around and my Twitter feed explodes with status updates about what everyone’s drinking, and jests about how badly they need those drinks.

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Will a glass (or more) hurt?

Even though we still see stories of bartenders refusing to serve pregnant women, people are much less strident when it comes to insisting that nine months of abstinence from alcohol is the only way to conduct oneself during pregnancy. Plenty of doctors, midwives and women themselves say a glass of wine here and there won’t lead to fetal alcohol syndrome.

To the frustration of many, there’s no consensus on how many ounces how frequently “here and there” means. Continue reading »

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Real Housewives of New York star Bethenny Frankel recently confessed to People magazine that her mother abused alcohol when Frankel was a child, which puts her at greater risk for mental illness as an adult, according to a new study by Yale University researchers.

Daughters of mothers who abused alcohol run a greater risk for developing mania, nicotine dependence, alcohol abuse and schizoid personality disorder, the study found. It’s to be published in the October edition of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

“Adult children of alcoholics are in general at much greater risk for developing every type of psychiatric illness,” regardless of gender, says Peter T. Morgan, professor of psychiatry at Yale. “The key, new finding of this work is that the effect parental alcoholism has on children is different depending on the gender of the alcoholic parent and the gender of the child,” he said.

It’s no wonder then that Frankel has chosen to come clean about her mother’s alcohol abuse and how deeply it’s affected her.  Despite criticism to the contrary, I think it’s a brave choice. Continue reading »

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Researchers have some good news and some bad news for parents who are concerned about underage drinking. The bad news is that despite your warnings, your kids are probably going to try alcohol at some point.  The good news is that depending upon your parenting style, you may have some sway when it comes to how much they drink. Continue reading »

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Awhile back, New York Times writer Paul Clarke said he thought it is good to drink around your kids as a parenting tactic because it teaches them moderation. Of course, Mr. Clarke is the Times’ alcohol beat writer, so I’m guessing he’s bound to come down on the “pro-drinking” side of many an argument. Me, I’m not so sure.

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We’ve all been there, drunk and passed out on the fast food restaurant playland, the kids joyfully amusing themselves. It’s the picture of a perfect afternoon until the dumb cops arrive. So presented with such an intrusion, naturally you turn your children into weapons.

And who wouldn’t? We’ve all dreamed of controlling our own vicious legion of toddlers, eager to do our evil bidding. I mean, that’s why we had kids in the first place. But quickly after they’re born we learned our babies are more interested in gnawing on the corner of a Dora blanket than being our henchman.

But one drunk father in Colorado Springs never gave up.

Joshua Alger, 28, is the aforementioned man. When McDonald’s employees called the police on the prostrate Alger the cops realized he already had a warrant out.

So Alger released his hounds kids. Alger freaked, commanding his kids to “bite the officers’ faces off.” They didn’t.

And what is the punishment for sicking your kids on the cops? You get tased, bro. No, the cops did not tase the kids too.

One wonders if this was a scenario he’d already prepared for, training his kids to attack on command. On a serious note, let’s hope these kids have more sober relatives willing to take them.

Source: Denver Westword

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Kids with an extra-sweet tooth may be at higher risk for future problems with alcoholism and addiction, a new study published by the journal Addiction says.

Or does it? What the scientists found was that kids who had a close relative who was an alcoholic preferred sweeter drinks than kids who did not have a drunk in the family. Children with symptoms of depression also preferred the sweetest drinks.

Repeat after me, Science People: correlation does not equal causality.

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