Examines what type of partners are chosen by adult children of alcoholics.
This paper presents the thesis that parental alcoholism can have a legacy which impacts the development of both individual family members and the patterns carried from one generation to the next. The paper explores the literature to show how the choice of marriage partners the child of an alcoholic will make as an adult will be influenced by their parent’s alcoholism. The paper highlights the low self-esteem, impulsiveness and negativity characterized by children of alcoholics and how they tend to recreate the patterns they had in their childhoods and either marry an alcoholic or suffer from a poor marriage. The paper includes a lot of resource material.
The development of children is an important area of study for most social science researchers. The need to understand what effects and then alters the cognitive development of children is necessary if productive and healthy development is to take place. Most researches have suggested that the traditional home -a mother and father living together with little conflict is the ideal home. Yet, in this era of chaos and broken family values such a home is impossible. Today, researchers are attempting to understand how broken homes and deviant backgrounds alter the child’s development and affect his or her behavior as an adult and thus, the choices the child will make in the future. Functional families will have well adjusted children but children from deviant homes will be dealing with psychological and social scars that will cause them to make certain choices that arise not from their cognitive sense but rather, from their past.