Lessons from the Stafford Ward Memorial Lecture during Children of Alcoholics (COA) Week 2023 

Children of Alcoholics Week is the annual campaign to raise awareness of children affected by a parent’s drinking, run by the charity Nacoa. This year, it ran from 12^th to 18^th February. As part of the week, Nacoa organized an event – The Stafford Ward Memorial Lecture – hosted in Parliament. Victoria Baker, Families and Young Persons Service Manager, attended the lecture. Here are her impressions of the event: 

“The Stafford Ward Memorial Lecture met all my expectations. The guests were candid and honest about their own firsthand experiences of growing up in a house where one or more parents were alcoholics; and were also able to articulate well the impact this had on them as children.  

The guest speakers were Jonathan Ashworth MP, the shadow secretary for the Department of Work and Pensions; Calum Best, Nacoa patron, TV star and entrepreneur; Hannah Thomas, football player at Dorking Wanders; Jaz Rai OBE, founder and CEO of the Sikh Recovery Network and partner of Nacoa’s ‘Widening Access Project’; and Hilary Henriques MBE, founder and chief executive of Nacoa UK. The event was chaired by journalist Camilla Tominey.  

All the speakers are children of alcoholics, so their insight was heartfelt and touching to see. You could see the passion they felt for Nacoa as an organisation, and how beneficial they would have found this resource if it had been available when they were children. 

Some key themes emerged: 

1. Isolation – all the speakers talked about feeling alone with the burdens their experiences created, and how important it was for young people to be supported whenever possible. 
2. Secrecy – all mentioned the unspoken rules that they intuitively knew about not discussing addiction or substance misuse outside of the home, and how talking about their home life might be considered disloyal in some way to their parents. 
3. Addiction – some spoke of their own struggles with addiction or risky behaviors and how growing up seeing alcohol being used as a method to escape the realities or difficulties of life made it seem ‘normal’. 
4. Stigma – Jaz Rai discussed trying to introduce the topic of alcoholism at home and within the Sikh community, where it is particularly stigmatised 
5. Funding – questions were asked of Jonathan Ashworth MP as to what can be done to reinstate the funding that has been removed to support COA.  

Nacoa highlighted a recent research study with 4,000 respondents that estimates that there are 3 million children in the UK living with parental alcohol problems. According to this research, they are six times as likely to see domestic violence, five times as likely to develop an eating disorder, three times as likely to consider suicide, twice as likely to experience difficulties at school, twice as likely to develop alcoholism or addiction themselves and twice as likely to be in trouble with the police. All of which were topics touched upon by the guest speakers at the lecture. 

This lecture provided some real ‘food for thought’ and highlighted for me the benefits of Forward’s M-PACT (Moving Parents and Children Together) programme, which gives children of parents struggling with addiction the opportunity to speak away from their parents in a safe space. M-PACT fosters an environment to speak about the difficulties they meet within the home and helps them to feel that they are not alone. 

It also made me think about the ‘Seven Cs’, which is something can be shared with children of alcoholics to help them understand the situation they have been put in without stigma. These are: 

1. I didn’t cause it
2. I can’t control it
3. I can’t cure it
4. But I can help take care of myself
5. By communicating my feelings
6. Making healthy choices 
7. And celebrating me 

Overall, a wonderful day was had by all, and whilst there were moments of sadness and a few tears the overall message was one of hope, so I would like to thank Nacoa for inviting The Forward Trust to attend their lecture, and most importantly for their continued efforts in raising awareness of the issues that children of alcoholics face.”