Secondhand Drinking can be a breeding ground for ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences).

Why?

ACEs – Adverse Childhood Experiences – Explained

The concept of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) was first introduced in the findings of the ACEs Study — a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego. The Study included 17,000 participants, whose average age was 57, mostly white, middle to upper middle class, all with jobs and health insurance. The Study assessed the associations between frequently occurring sources of stress in childhood (aka childhood trauma | childhood maltreatment) and a participant’s later-life physical and emotional health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, substance abuse, and depression.

Examples of these frequently occurring sources of stress – ACEs – include:

• physical, sexual and verbal abuse;
• physical and emotional neglect;
• violence between parents or caregivers;
• other kinds of serious household dysfunction, such as a parent’s alcohol and substance abuse or untreated depression or other mental illness;
• losing a parent to divorce, separation or other reason.

Why ACEs Hurt Children and Influence a Person’s Lifetime Physical and Emotional Health

ACEs are so problematic because they occur during a child’s early brain development. This involves neural network wiring (an electro-chemical signaling process by which the brain cells [neurons] communicate with one another and others throughout the body via the nervous system and thereby control everything a person thinks, feels, says and does).

Humans are born with approxiamtely 100 billion brain cells (neurons) – roughly the number we have as adults. If they were wired at birth, we would come out doing what we do as adults. Clearly, that’s not the case, which means from birth (and en eutero), a child’s brain is wiring neural networks (the electrical-chemical signaling process just described) for everything a child thinks, feels, says and does, and then “mapping” neural networks that frequently fire together (i.e., walking, reading, running, doing maths, talking, reacting to stress – the activities we do repeatedly and thus the brain maps as our “default” behavior / habit / coping skill).

Some of the key influences on that wiring and mapping – meaning which neurons are talking and to which ones and which, when frequently firing together, become our “default” behaviors / habits / coping skills – include: genetics, social environment and stress. These two articles by Harvard University Center on the Developing Child explain:

• Toxic Stress
• Brain Architecture

What the ACEs study showed is that absent protective | resiliency factors, children experiencing ACEs were at greater risk for developing stress-related physical and emotional health consequences caused by chronic activiation of the brain’s fight-or-flight stress response system.  In other words, ACEs causes toxic stress; toxic stress damages a child’s developing brain.

The following text and images are a direct quote from health, science and technology journalist and editor and founder of ACESTooHigh, Jane Ellen Stevens‘, October 3, 2012, article, “The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study — the largest, most important public health study you never heard of — began in an obesity clinic,”

“[Robert F.] Anda, [MD, MS] and [Dr. Vincent] Felitti developed a scoring system for ACEs. Each type of adverse childhood experience counted as one point. If a person had none of the events in her or his background, the ACE score was zero. If someone was verbally abused thousands of times during his or her childhood, but no other types of childhood trauma occurred, this counted as one point in the ACE score. If a person experienced verbal abuse, lived with a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, his ACE score was three.

“Things start getting serious around an ACE score of 4. Compared with people with zero ACEs, those with four categories of ACEs had a 240 percent greater risk of hepatitis, were 390 percent more likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema or chronic bronchitis), and a 240 percent higher risk of a sexually-transmitted disease.

“They were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, seven times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs.

“People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, more auto-immune diseases, and more work absences.

“’Some of the increases are enormous and are of a size that you rarely ever see in health studies or epidemiological studies. It changed my thinking dramatically,’ says Anda.

“Two in nine people had an ACE score of 3 or more, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more. This means that every physician probably sees several high ACE score patients every day, notes Felitti. ‘Typically, they are the most difficult, though the underpinnings will rarely be recognized.’”

— quoted from Jane Ellen Stevens’, October 3, 2012, article, “The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study — the largest, most important public health study you never heard of — began in an obesity clinic,”

Secondhand Drinking and the ACEs Breeding Ground Connection

Secondhand Drinking – the negative impacts of a person’s drinking behaviors on others – is a breeding ground for ACEs because of the stress that coping with drinking behaviors causes [check out “The Fight or Flight Stress Response – Secondhand Drinking Connection“]. These drinking behaviors include:

• verbal, physical, emotional abuse;
• neglect;
• unintended, unplanned sex; sexual assault;
• domestic violence (according to NCADD, “75% of domestic abuse is committed while one or both members are intoxicated”);
• driving while impaired;
• blackouts;
• alcohol-induced suicide.

Drinking behaviors are the result of a number of drinking patterns (binge drinking, heavy social drinking, alcohol abuse and alcoholism). They occur when the ethyl alcohol chemical in alcoholic beverages changes brain function.

Comparing this list of drinking behaviors to the list of ACEs above, one can easily recognize the connection between growing up with frequently occurring secondhand drinking and having 4+ ACEs.

Bottom Line

Preventing secondhand drinking and/or helping children better understand it and how to healthily cope with it can be key to helping a child build the resiliency | protective factors they can use to counter the impacts of secondhand drinking-related ACEs.

For More Information

ACEs 101 provides an excellent overview, as does Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s 16 minute TED talk:

• Bio
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Lisa Frederiksen

Author | Speaker | Consultant | Founder at BreakingTheCycles.com

Lisa Frederiksen is the author of hundreds of articles and 12 books, including her latest, "10th Anniversary Edition If You Loved Me, You'd Stop! What you really need to know when your loved one drinks too much,” and "Loved One In Treatment? Now What!” She is a national keynote speaker with over 30 years speaking experience, consultant and founder of BreakingTheCycles.com. Lisa has spent the last 19+ years studying and simplifying breakthrough research on the brain, substance use and other mental health disorders, secondhand drinking, toxic stress, trauma/ACEs and related topics.

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