Vuxna barns självbiografiska skildringar av att växa upp med en alkoholmissbrukande förälder

Sammanfattning: One fifth of Sweden's children growing up have under their childhood had at least one parent who had an alcohol use disorder. Children are individually affected in different ways by the circumstances of their upbringing and it is not something that is always apparent to those outside the family circle.  It becomes a dilemma when these children's voices aren't heard. Another compounding factor can be an absence of social support and intervention often carried out by social workers. Social programs adapted to these children’s situation can help break the silence and reach the individuals hiding behind the masks put on to shield off the world outside. We were interested how individuals who had been subjected to having a parent with an alcohol disorder described their experiences and how they felt they had been affected by that circumstance. We wanted to leverage this to reach a deeper understanding of how to better support children living with this situation. This formed the purpose of the of this study and gave rise to the questions investigated. The method employed to conduct the study was a thematic analysis on six swedish autobiographies within this framework. After the autobiographies had been read, four different themes to further investigate emerged: escape from reality, consequences embodied as adults, socioeconomic situation, and relevant social work. Analyses showed that the authors were affected by difficult childhoods impacted by parental alcohol use disorders in a multitude of different ways.  By example, they devised different methods to flee their predicament as children. The results also showed these children could be found in different types of homes and strata across the spectrum of socioeconomic statuses. The now grown children also believed that their childhoods would have been improved if they had had more caring, secure adults in their vicinity to their lives otherwise filled with chaos.