Child Dipsomaniacs

The stories of 20 habitual child drunkards, age 5 to 14, were told by Dr. Reginald S. Lourie in the American Jour nal of Orthopsychiatry. They were cases from Manhattan's Children Court (121 child dipsomaniacs in one year), Bellevue Hospital (30 cases from 1936 to 1941) and the Children's Society.

Why Children Drink. 'The cases fell into five main classes: 1) children who drank to escape an unbearable situation; 2) children whose drinking was an expression of their attitude toward others, e.g., a boy drinking to spite his drunken father; 3) "latent or overt homosexuals"; 4) psychopathic personalities; 5) psychotics. Examples:

P:Mary, 11, lost her mother, and her older sister got sick. Mary had to manage her younger brother, and cook. Her father did not like her cooking and beat her. Mary's solace was the wine which all the children had at each meal. "She wished for death, and, feeling she might achieve this by excessive drinking, drank more than a tumblerful of wine every night. . . ." She wound up in the hospital, sick and stuporous after drinking a pint of wine. After her sister got well and her father hired a housekeeper, Mary's thirst disappeared. In fact, the idea of wine nauseated her.

P:Eileen, 10, drank because she was dull in school. "She was in the same class for the third successive term. She stopped on her way to class at her aunt's home . . . every morning and surreptitiously took drinks [of liquor] in increasing number till she was found to be sleeping through class. Finally, she never reached school, falling in a coma on a street corner."

P:Harvey, 5, "was brought home in an intoxicated condition once or twice a week.

His pretty 28-year-old mother was a cho rus dancer who had been alcoholic for about ten years." The little boy passed most of his time with his mother "including the afternoons and evenings she spent in the back room of the neighborhood bar. He demanded a sip of beer from each glass. . . . He would go from customer to customer asking for sips and begging for nickels to play Margie in the jukebox (Margie was his mother's name)." His trouble, according to the doctor: an oedipus complex which caused him to imitate his mother. He forgot all about drinking after two months in an institution.

Dr. Lourie concludes that, except in the case of psychopaths and psychotics, drinking by children usually stops promptly when the situation prompting it disappears, and apparently does not predispose them to overindulgence in later life.

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