Life with Father (Who Drinks)

MANNERS & MORALS

The slight, freckle-faced girl, aged 15, her cheeks reddening with embarrassment, swallowed and asked quietly: "What if someone comes home, and he starts tearing things up and kicking you around? What do you do?" Her thinly veiled hypothetical question, raised last week at a meeting in the basement of a Fort Worth church, was a stranger's standard approach. But to the 14 other teen-agers on hand it proved conclusively that the shy questioner shared with them a familiar and shattering problem: alcoholic parents.

The small Fort Worth group, which has been meeting weekly since last November, is typical in membership, questions and answers of one of the least-known but fastest-growing teen-age organizations in the U.S. It is called Alateen. Founded in 1957 in Pasadena, Calif. by the high-school-aged son of an alcoholic, Alateen now numbers 65 chapters in the U.S., three in Canada, two in Australia; 50 more are being organized in the U.S. Membership in each group averages ten boys and girls whose adolescence is scarred, often literally, by an alcoholic parent. The youngsters range from 12 to 20, operate under the general guidance of Al-Anon, an older and larger offshoot for adults (wives, friends and relatives) of Alcoholics Anonymous. Like Al-Anon and AA, the teen-agers address each other by first names only, promise not to reveal one another's participation.

Once the ice was broken at the Fort Worth session, the answers to the visitor's "What do you do?'' came fast and even flippantly:

"You leave," said one youth.

"We can't reason with this individual when he's drunk. I'd go to the farthest corner of the house. Just try to get out of the way," counseled another.

"Don't lock yourself in the bathroom," cautioned a third. "That's the worst place."

"Yeah," piped up a bobbysoxer, "they'll break the door down." Her remark produced a burst of laughter.

The layer of laughter, on a grim foundation, was an uninhibited, spontaneous measure of the extent to which Alateens learn to live with their special set of problems. They share advice on such crises as what to tell a date who shows up when Dad has been taken drunk in the living room. Answer: explain later to the date that father is an alcoholic and a sick person. Through discussions, lectures and films, they explore the broader problem of alcoholism. But their study is not aimed at helping them to help a drinking parent to reform or even find his way to AA. That is a job for the alcoholic himself. Alateens seek an understanding of the problem and a way to live with it. "When it works," explained a Fort Worth adult counselor, "they quit trying to change the things they can't change, quit trying to make their daddies stop drinking, quit fussing and feeling sorry for themselves."

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