Abstract
This article examines how people in childhood responded emotionally to family members’ drinking in Finland, Italy, and Sweden. The data consist of retrospective childhood memories told and shared in a focus group context. The results suggest that in the Mediterranean drinking cultures, children develop a neutral and safe emotional contact with drinking. In the intoxication-oriented drinking cultures, in turn, children build an ambivalent contact with drinking with more or less positive or negative emotions. However, the results also reveal that this ambivalence does not need to be per se a threatening circumstance regarding children’s safety.
Keywords
In this article, we analyze narratives that have been produced in a focus group context in Finland, Italy, and Sweden, and that deal with how interviewees in childhood responded emotionally to family members’ drinking in the domestic sphere. Hence, our data consist of retrospective autobiographical memories that are stories about the past but which have been constructed in the present (Bamberg, 2012). The childhood stories are not influential only for people themselves. They serve also as a way to present ourselves to others and to make sense of one’s childhood experiences and emotions in a culturally appropriate way by linking them to wider social narratives (Turunen et al., 2015). The focus group method is a research tool that is well suited to producing narratives where the personal and the social are interweaved together. In a focus group situation, interviewees are expected to tell their personal stories so that the participants who are present can easily understand how these personal stories are meaningful with respect to broader sociocultural and historical contexts (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006).
Telling stories about the past, present, and future is a principal part of social life (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006) and of identity construction (Bamberg, 2012). Through the narrative discourse of recalling, recounting, and reflecting on actions, events, and actors, we seek to organize life and to establish a sense of who we are (Bamberg, 2012). This implies a constitutive view to narratives (Presser and Sandberg, 2015). From this perspective, past, present, or imagined experiences are not approached as objective representations or subjective interpretations about what has happened, what is going on now, or what will happen next. Rather, they are considered as narrative verbalizations that give form to our experiences and images of the self through relating them to wider storied experiences and identities circulating in the culture (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006). In this way, narratives reproduce and hand down culturally shared values (Bamberg, 2012). By telling stories, individuals position their own values and actions in relation to recognized and shared categories and, in doing so, engage in narrating to themselves who they are (Bamberg, 2012).
In the study, our starting point is that alcohol is an expressive symbolic marker of states of emotions (Lupton, 1996). From the viewpoint of a child who is observing adults’ behavior, drinking can appear as a mundane routine-like activity that does not generate any special emotions or as a mood setter that either brings forth positive or negative emotions (Gusfield, 1987). In the latter case, alcohol may raise the spirits of the people around, make the drinkers loving, happy, or funny, thus generating in a child a positive contact and positive emotions toward drinking, or it may transform drinkers’ behavior unpredictable, into threatening or aggressive behavior, thus causing negative emotions to drinking in the child. Then it starts to disturb a child’s personal security in everyday life.
Furthermore, we assume that drinking, even in similar kinds of situations, arouses diverse emotional reactions in children in different cultural contexts, generational circumstances, and social surroundings. In our research setting, Finland and Sweden represent Nordic intoxication-oriented drinking cultures (Hauge and Irgens-Jensen, 1987; Mäkela et al., 2012), whereas Italy, in turn, represents Mediterranean meal-drinking cultures (Allamani et al., 2010; Tigerstedt and Törrönen, 2007). It is likely that our interviewees’ storied experiences from Nordic countries, where alcohol has traditionally been used to transgress everyday life norms during seasonal feasts and weekend celebrations, give witness to more negative emotions toward drinking than those from Italy, where alcohol has for centuries been an organic part of daily nutrition, with social norms that prohibit heavy drinking.
We lack studies on how adults’ ways of drinking in diverse drinking situations affect children emotionally. Most of the studies have examined how childhood emotional abuses are later related to alcohol misuse in (young) adulthood (e.g. Shin et al., 2015). Jayne and Valentine’s (2016) research on how children themselves as agents may emotionally respond to adult drinking provides an exception in the literature. Their study shows that children may experience adult drunkenness in a holiday context as either amusingly funny occasions or as fearful events that you should avoid. Overall, there is no research that compares how children emotionally experience diverse drinking situations and whether the emotional responses are gendered and differ depending on social, cultural, and generational background. This article takes on this task by producing knowledge about children’s emotional responses to adult drinking in three different cultural and geographical contexts, among male and female interviewees from different generations and social backgrounds. It clarifies what kinds of drinking by family members produce emotionally safe contact with alcohol, what kinds of drinking create emotionally ambivalent and disturbing contacts with alcohol, and what kinds of drinking generate purely negative and fearful contacts with alcohol among children.
Emotions as relational and situational sociocultural constructions
In the article, we approach focus group participants’ retrospective autobiographical stories about alcohol in their childhood from the perspective of emotions. First, we approach emotions as sociocultural constructions (Lupton, 1998). We assume that emotions are conditioned by the cultural norms and values of a society. Emotions are learned by identification and naming through a socialization process, which consist of patterned and repeated social interactions (Illouz et al., 2014). Second, we assume that emotions emerge and are generated in relation to concrete situations (Lupton, 1998). We agree with Ahmed (2004a) that “(e)motions are shaped by contact with objects [in a situation], rather than being caused by objects” (p. 6). In this sense, we consider emotions as cultural, relational, and situational: they appear and are formed in a dynamic relation to people, their behavior, and their activities in a specific setting, and are conditioned by culture.
Our interviewees’ narratives, in which they recall, recount, and reflect on their childhood experiences in relation to family members’ drinking, articulate expressively and concretely what kinds of emotional contacts they developed toward alcohol consumption in specific situations when they were children. For example, when the interviewee tells a story in which his family and relatives have gathered together to celebrate a grandmother’s 60th birthday and in which he, as a 6-year-old boy, became afraid of the changed behavior of his parents and relatives when they got intoxicated, we have a story that articulates a fearful contact with family members’ drinking in a festive situation and delineates an unsafe space in the boy’s childhood. In contrast, a narrative that witnesses a family meal with wine drinking that produced an amiable atmosphere including loving communication between family members exemplifies a story in which drinking produces a positive contact with alcohol and outlines a safe everyday life space in the life of the child.
Repetitive family rituals are important sites for the construction and reproduction of emotional relationships and group emotions within the family or among the relatives (Lupton, 1996). For example, in meal rituals, children are acculturated into civilized table manners. When everything goes well, drinking and eating stand for happy activities that assemble the family around good feelings (Ahmed, 2008). Correspondingly, in festive rituals, children are acculturated into ceremonial situations and modes. The celebratory drinking rituals aim to maximize the emotional energy of a group (Collins, 2004), but as our analysis later shows, in many cases the festive drinking rituals are problematic to children, who often develop an ambivalent or fearful contact to them.
In what follows, we will identify and analyze the kinds of emotional contacts that characterize the focus group participants’ retrospective childhood stories in the context of diverse domestic drinking situations. The personal stories show how children in their own space and worlds felt about family members’ drinking, whether they felt included in the social situations of their family practices or separated from them through positive or negative associations (see Ahmed, 2004b). Since the stories have been told by adults, they embody two different time-space zones: the there-and-then time-space zone of the past and the here-and-now time-space zone of the focus group interaction (Bamberg, 2012). In other words, while people tell personal stories about how they felt about family members’ drinking in their childhood, they, at the same time, express, clarify, or explain to other participants how these stories and their storied emotions should be understood in relation to the interaction going on here and now. This does not decrease the value of our retrospective stories or prevent us from reconstructing and identifying children’s perspectives and emotional contacts toward alcohol (cf. Tisenkopfs, 1993). Rather, in the group situation, the interviewees need to make their childhood experiences understandable to other participants by relating them to culturally shared values and normative discourses (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006). This way our interviewees’ storied childhood emotions surrounding alcohol capture broader social and cultural meanings attached to drinking situations and their elements: drinkers, drinking behavior, drinking-related activities, and places of drinking (Ahmed, 2004b). The interviewees may, for example, describe witnessing their father’s beer drinking in connection with a weekly sauna event and then add a comment that there was nothing negative in it. This kind of framing of drinking events in relation to a negative image hints that in the society and culture in which the focus group participants live, drinking is an ambivalent issue: even positive drinking events can have negative connotations. Since it is not uncommon that drinking produces harmful consequences, the focus group participants feel a need to specify to other participants that in this specific case, drinking was not a menace to the orderliness of everyday life.
Our research setting provides a productive frame to analyze how the storied childhood emotions reflect different cultural and geographical circumstances to drinking. First, in Italy, the orientation to different drinking situations has for centuries been conditioned by the norms of eating while drinking and of avoiding intoxication. In Scandinavia, in turn, drinking has been based on the aspiration to transgress everyday life routines by intoxication (Rolando et al., 2014). While drinking has traditionally been treated as a nutrient, as a normal part of everyday life in Italy, drinking has been treated as an intoxicant that is used to break away from everyday life in Scandinavia.
Second, our data allow us to analyze how the retrospective stories embody continuities and changes in the childhood emotions to drinking. Our data includes four generational groups and covers childhood experiences to alcohol from the 1960s to the beginning of the 2000s. During this period, alcohol consumption tripled in Finland and doubled in Sweden. In particular, women’s share of total consumption increased. Nowadays, women account for some 30% of the total consumption in Sweden (Kühlhorn and Björ, 1998) and about 25% in Finland (Mäkela et al., 2012). By contrast, in Italy alcohol consumption has gone down since the 1970s. In the early 2000s, it converged with the level of alcohol consumption in Finland and Sweden. Specifically, daily meal drinking among men and women decreased, with an increase in occasional and out of meals drinking in the evening. Furthermore, during the study period, alcohol consumption by women constituted about half that of men (Allamani et al., 2010), and since the 1980s, the number of female drinkers decreased (Voller, 2007).
Since the 1960s, all the countries under study have urbanized strongly. However, migration from the countryside to urban environments affected alcohol consumption in Italy in the opposite direction to that seen in Finland and Sweden. As Swedes and Finns moved to wetter surroundings that increased their possibilities to drink, in Italy migration signified a movement from wet drinking practices to drier circumstances (Allamani et al., 2010). Furthermore, even though many things changed in the urbanization process, the cultural position of alcohol did not: In Italy, alcohol was not transformed into a weekend drug of intoxication but maintained its identity as a nutrient; In Scandinavia, alcohol did not lose its identity as an intoxicant but rather strengthened it as intoxication-driven drinking spread out among women and young people (Törrönen and Roumeliotis, 2014).
Third, our data provide a possibility to analyze whether the childhood memories of drinking vary by educational background or gender (see Table 1). Our data include both women and men who are less educated and from working class, as well as women and men who are more educated and from middle class with an assumption that since their position in a society is different or they have been socialized into drinking through gendered expectations, they may also express class-related or gendered differences in their childhood memories of drinking. For example, earlier studies show that there is still a strong double standard applied to female alcohol consumption (Roumeliotis and Törrönen, 2014). While drinking has traditionally been viewed as an acceptable behavior for men, women’s drinking has repeatedly aroused public anxiety: it has been seen as threatening their responsibilities as mothers and associated with shame.
Finnish, Italian, and Swedish focus group data (N = 51).
The first pair of numbers in the parentheses refers to the age of the participants in the Finnish and Swedish focus groups and the latter pair of numbers refers to the age of the participants in the Italian focus groups.
Letters W and M signify whether the focus group is composed of women (W) or men (M), numbers after W and M differentiate the focus groups and the number in the parentheses informs how many interviewees participated to the focus group.
Data and analysis
In Finland and Italy, we conducted 16 and in Sweden 19 focus group interviews. In Finland, 35 men and 52 women participated in the interviews, in Italy 53 men and 49 women participated, and in Sweden 49 men and 62 women participated (see Table 1). The data were collected in Finland and Italy from October to December 2007 and in Sweden from 2008 to 2010. We conducted the focus group interviews in the metropolitan areas of Helsinki, Stockholm, and Torino by using identical data collection procedures and by interviewing both educated and less educated women and men from four different age groups. The high-educated groups consisted of teachers and students. We assumed that they represent typical middle-class cultures. The less educated groups consisted of construction workers, practical nurses, and students. We supposed that they communicate more traditional representations of masculine and feminine working-class cultures.
The interviewees were recruited by contacting trade unions, workplaces, and schools to obtain the names of possible key informants who would fit our criteria for age, gender, and education, and who could assemble a group of friends or colleagues for a focus group interview. The interviews were done in native language by two researchers at the research institution or at the interviewees study or workplaces. One of the researchers functioned as a moderator and the other took care of the recording or videotaping. The interviews took from 50 minutes to 2 hours. All interviews were transcribed in full (Törrönen et al., 2017).
In focus group interviews, the question concerning emotional responses to family members or others’ drinking was posed in the following way: “How were you first confronted with/did you become aware of other people’s alcohol use? Could you describe that situation? What happened? What kinds of people were present? What were your feelings?” The question was not considered intimidating. Rather, it looked like the interviewees had obtained dynamic distance to their past and were keen to recount even quite negative experiences from their childhood to other participants and to the researchers.
In analyzing what kinds of emotions family members’ drinking has produced among our interviewees when they were young, we first paid attention to the situations of drinking in relation to which their emotions as children developed. We noticed that our interviewees’ alcohol-related childhood memories revolved around six repeating storylines that we here call master narratives: meal drinking during the week, meal drinking on weekends, moderate routine drinking at home, heavy problematic domestic drinking, drinking in festive situations, and observing the winemaking process (see Table 2). The master narratives differ from each other by the character of the situation, by the function of drinking in the situation, and by whether drinking changes the behavior of its main actors. After having identified the repeating master narratives, we then analyzed how children’s contact with alcohol developed in the narratives (see Ahmed, 2004a). We examined how the events of the different master narratives affected the interviewees as children: did they produce safe, beneficial, and pleasurable or unsafe, harmful, and fearsome experiences among children. We detected that the interviewees’ retrospective autobiographical stories on alcohol witnessed many kinds of emotions, such as neutral affects, love, fun, pride, fear, anxiety, shame, and curiosity (see Table 2). Finally, we explored how the interviewees clarified, explained, or specified the drinking they observed as children to other focus group participants. The clarifying remarks tell about the wider cultural connotations and emotional landscapes that drinking symbolizes in the society the interviewees live in.
The repeating master narratives (drinking situations) and the emotional contacts the interviewees formed toward them as children in Finland, Sweden, and Italy.
F: Finland; S: Sweden; I: Italy.
It is seen that shame does not exist in Italy and pride does not exist in Finland and Sweden as an emotional contact. We can also count that in Finland and Sweden all interviewees told one or two stories about how they first confronted alcohol as children. From Finland, we have 130 stories and from Sweden 136. From Italy, we have 72 stories. About one-third of the Italian interviewees did not remember any specific stories from their childhood.
Next, we present the most frequent master narratives we identified from the Italian data and examine what kinds of emotional contacts to alcohol our interviewees developed as children. Then we move on to analyze the corresponding issues in the Finnish and Swedish data. The excerpts from the data analyzed below were translated to English by researchers.
The most typical master narratives and emotional contacts with alcohol among the Italian participants
The most repeating master narrative among the Italian participants is related to ordinary meal drinking among family members and relatives during weekdays (see Table 2). The following Excerpt 1 provides a typical example of this: Excerpt 1 My first memory about drinking goes back to early childhood […] when I was living in the Piedmont region (wine production area) I remember that a big bottle of wine was always present on the table. My grandfather, my father, my mother and almost all my relatives always had wine with the meal […]. (Claudio [cover name], M23)
Since drinking wine appears in the context of this master narrative to be as normal as drinking water or milk and even as nutrition, drinking does not arouse any special emotions among children. It does not move them to noticeable feelings. From these stories, we can reconstruct that wine drinking has had so strong and normal a presence in our interviewees’ childhood that it has become “a background component” (W18: Stefania) and takes on an invisible presence. Therefore, the interviewees are not able to go back to an exact moment when they first observed their family members drinking (e.g. M21 and W18). Even if they cannot name a specific occasion, they can certainly figure out that the first time they observed their family members drinking was during the family meals, since in their childhood a wine bottle was always there on the table “as a normal part of the meal” (M29: Mario). Although the stories of this master narrative do not witness the development of visible emotions among children in relation to drinking, they construct a picture of safe drinking occasions for children.
Some interviewees’ stories on meal drinking from Italy include a reference to love. Excerpt 2 shows how children may experience wine tasting with a family as a sign of love and adults’ wine drinking with good food as events evoking good-natured feelings: Excerpt 2 I come from a very pleasure-loving family. We have always drunk regularly, at lunch and dinner, and been a family that loves good food. I remember that there were a lot of friends who came to meet us. I have always related [drinking] to good natured moments. (Antonella, W18) My first memory is related to my grandmother, who is not alive anymore. It is the first time I tasted wine. A little bit of wine with water, together with a green apple soaked in wine, was given to me. I must say that this is a good memory […]. (Mauro, M22)
The presence of positive emotions is even more obvious in the context of meal drinking on Sundays and in festive situations that constitute one repeating master narrative in the Italian data, though not as prominent as the master narrative on meal drinking during weekdays (see Table 2). What makes the Sunday meals and festive situations more special in terms of the development of children’s contact and emotions in relation to alcohol is the framing of the situation as a festive happening that includes more guests and more variety in drinks. More festive situations provide a setting in which children produce a more memorable contact with drinking, as well as more visible emotions. However, in contrast to the experiences of the Finnish and Swedish participants, as we will later see, the Italian participants have experienced festive situations almost solely through positive emotions. As children, they experienced these situations as celebrations of togetherness, generosity, and hospitality with positive emotions of love, curiosity, and fun (W27, W26, and W18), as well as of pride, especially when they felt part of a big and generous family: Excerpt 3 If I go back, I remember when I was a child and a guest visited the village. He was served coffee, but more often Rosolio (liqueur) or Vermouth (fortified wine). I always associated alcohol to something pleasant, festive, never to be something exaggerated. (Pia, W27) On Sundays or during festivities we enjoyed a bottle of good wine, especially when we had visitors. We had an open home, always full of people. (Assunta, W20)
As we can read from Excerpt 3, in the Sunday meals and on other celebratory occasions, parents, relatives, and guests may drink more than during the weekdays but drinking does not usually develop into excessive consumption. Therefore, children experience these situations as safe and are receptive to developing many kinds of positive emotions in relation to them that are associated with sociability, bigheartedness, and openness.
Among the Italian interviewees, there also exists a repeating master narrative that is linked to the winemaking process. This master narrative is more common among the older interviewees, but it is also present among the younger participants: Excerpt 4 My family had some vineyards. We went with my uncle to pick grapes. We tasted the must and even the wine, after it had been bottled. And I was no more than 7. (Nino, M22) I have an image of Sundays when we always drunk my grandpa’s wine. It has a special taste, I mean, it was different, red, it was made of grapes without adding water and powders […] I was thinking about all that hard work he has put to provide us with those mythical 25 liters per year. (Davide, M21)
As Excerpt 4 demonstrates, it is not unusual in Italy that children are allowed to help the family to pick grapes (M30), to taste the must (M30), to put the wine into bottles (W17 and M23), and even try a little bit of wine (M21, M30, and M22). Some of the Italian interviewees as children experienced the winemaking process by developing a neutral contact toward it, like Nino in Excerpt 4 above, but many experienced the process with pride, such as Davide. Especially the more educated young interviewees who came from rural areas tended to have pride-related memories toward the winemaking process and they may even attribute mythical symbolic values to it. This may be because nowadays winemaking is not as common in Italy as it was in the past. Recently, winemaking has received a lot of publicity and been related to the production of high-quality natural wines without chemical additives. Perhaps this has added more value to the winemaking process in the minds of young people and made it more glorious.
Even if the Italian interviewees’ childhood memories relating to alcohol are dominated by neutral or positive emotions, there is one repeating master narrative that relates to negative experiences of drinking: Excerpt 5 I remember a drinking person very dear to me, an old person, I saw him drinking, I saw him getting drunk, I saw him being sick, and I suffered a lot. […]. (Anna, W19)
Especially female interviewees tell stories of how they as children felt anxiety about heavy problematic domestic drinking by fathers, grandfathers, or male relatives (see Table 2). Their childhood stories witness how male family members’ addiction to alcohol caused marital disputes and violence toward women (W19, W26, W28, and M30). However, as children they did not feel resentment or shame toward their male family members’ problematic behavior. They rather took an attitude of tolerance toward it, since they felt that the bad or violent behavior comes from the addictive power of alcohol, not from the person himself: “my grandfather was a good person, he really was, but when he drank all hell broke loose” (W28: Maria).
The most typical master narratives and emotional contacts with alcohol among the Finnish and Swedish participants
Among the Finnish participants, the most repeated master narrative on first memories of alcohol relates to heavy problem drinking at home (see Table 2). This master narrative is much less prominent in the Swedish data. The following example concretizes the master narrative of heavy problem drinking at home: Excerpt 6 My father was not an alcoholic. He drank seldom but when he drank he became very aggressive. He had long good periods but when the time for drinking came I needed to lurk and was even afraid for a couple of days, that nothing bad would happen. (Saku, M8)
Excerpt 6 shows that heavy problem drinking changes the identity of the loving parent, making him appear strange and unpredictable. Children’s contact with drinking is then constituted as anxiety ridden, frightening or terrifying, with the consequence that the safe protective space of the home becomes an unsafe threatening space in which the child experiences a violent atmosphere and s/he is forced to hide from her or his parents.
The heavy domestic problem drinking of fathers dominates childhood contacts with alcohol in the Finnish data. The Swedish participants’ first memories of alcohol, in turn, are mostly related to parents or relatives’ drinking during celebrations and festive situations (see Table 2). This master narrative is also common in the Finnish data. However, it is not as strongly associated with positive emotions as in the Swedish data. Our Scandinavian interviewees as children have experienced festive situations either through happiness and joyfulness or through negative feelings. Excerpt 7 includes examples of how children’s contact with celebrations and festive situations developed in a safe way with positive emotions. In this case, children’s emotional responses to alcohol were associated with having fun: Excerpt 7 When there were big family celebrations […] like grandfather had a 60th or 50th birthday. In these parties, I remember seeing intoxicated men who were a little bit funny, but I did not experience it as unpleasant. (Ulf, M35) With festive situations, anniversaries, Christmas, and the like, my relatives drank a little bit of wine and schnapps. I associated these situations only with funny things. (Daga, W30)
Excerpt 8, in turn, demonstrates how children developed fear in relation to significant others’ intoxication in festive situations: Excerpt 8 […] I remember that I was afraid of my uncle every Midsummer. He always drank himself stupid and was somewhat aggressive. I remember hiding from him […]. (Lauri, M14)
In Excerpt 9, we see two examples of the master narrative of moderate routine drinking at home. As Table 2 shows, it is the second most repeating master narrative in the Swedish data and the third most repeating master narrative in the Finnish data: Excerpt 9 I do not have any strong negative experiences […] sometimes father opened a beer after work and watched football on TV, this kind of traditional (observation). (Olli, M5) I remember my father drank a little bit of pilsner while having a sauna, my mother never had any alcohol. (Marja, W20)
As we can read from Excerpt 9, in the master narrative of moderate routine drinking at home, children’s contact with drinking develops in relation to fathers’ individual rituals and habits. Since fathers’ moderate drinking does not change their behavior, the situation does not move the child toward positive or negative emotions. On these occasions, drinking produces a contact that children experience as safe. Drinking does not separate fathers and children into different spaces, and neither does it distort the loving atmosphere at home.
Table 2 shows that meal drinking during weekdays is a rarely occurring master narrative among the Scandinavian participants in contrast to the Italian interviewees’ childhood memories. Instead, meal drinking on weekends is a significant master narrative in the Swedish data but occupies a much less prominent place in the Finnish data. In our Scandinavian data, meal drinking at the weekend signifies a family dinner that has been better prepared and that differs from weekdays’ dinner by being more festive. The interviewees tell of having experienced these kinds of weekend meals as pleasurable, love-producing rituals, in which they felt closeness to parents, relatives, and guests and observed good-natured enjoyment among the people who are present (W18, W19, M23, and M33).
The above examples demonstrate that Finnish and Swedish childhood memories of alcohol are based on similar kinds of repeating master narratives. However, they differ in the kinds of emotional contacts with drinking they experienced and developed as children. Among the Swedish participants, fun is the most prominent emotion in relation to alcohol (see Table 2). Fun is related to pleasurable and successful intensifications of social relations. When drinking remains in the sphere of sociability and adults do not lose their everyday life identities, their behavior may appear to children as funny, happy, or pleasantly ceremonial (W1, W4, M14, W28, W30, and M33). Also, children may then have fun. Among the Finnish participants, in turn, fear is the most dominant childhood emotion in relation to alcohol. Fear also lurks in the Swedish data but much less prominently (see Table 2). In both countries, the storied childhood emotions in relation to drinking show that fear is associated with an intoxication that changes the behavior of the drinker. In the context of heavy problematic domestic drinking, the interviewees’ narratives of fear are mostly related to the father’s drinking. When drinking renders the father unpredictable, aggressive, or violent, he appears to the child as an alien (W3, W4, W10, M15, and W28). Also, festive situations are often transformed into fearful situations, especially in the Finnish data. In festive drinking situations, the frightening contact is formed by a group of men, including usually the father, relatives, and/or friends who become too intoxicated and start to fight or become mean (W1, M6, M14, M25, W18, and W28).
Children’s neutral observation of parent’s moderate routine drinking at home is the second most common emotion both among the Swedish and Finnish participants (see Table 2). In this case, drinking emerges for the child as a normal activity at home that does not change the behavior of parents or the habitual flow of everyday life events. In these cases, drinking is integrated into other everyday life activities and appears as an individual habit. The Finnish interviewees’ neutral childhood emotions are mostly associated with fathers’ beer drinking while watching TV (M5) or after sauna (M13). The Swedish interviewees witness more the mothers’ or grandmothers’ moderate beer, schnapps, liqueur, port wine, or wine drinking at home (e.g. W18, M22, M23, and W27).
The emotion of love is the third most common contact with drinking among the Swedish participants but is not so present among the Finnish interviewees’ childhood experiences. The least repeating storied childhood emotions regarding family members’ drinking in the Finnish and Swedish data are curiosity and shame (see Table 2). In terms of curiosity, the child may wonder what kind of liquid the adults are drinking or why are the adults raising their voices or starting to sing songs as the evening proceeds (W4, M5, W18, and M22). Shame, in turn, is related to the situations where the father drinks too much with the consequence that the child feels shame about his behavior (W9, M23, and M25).
Discussion and conclusion
Our analysis shows how a Mediterranean meal-drinking culture and a Scandinavian intoxication-oriented drinking culture differentially condition the development of children’s emotional contact to drinking. In the Italian participants’ retrospective stories, children’s emotional socialization to drinking is governed by everyday life or festive moderate meal drinking situations through which they cultivate a neutral contact to alcohol. In the Finnish stories, in turn, children’s emotional socialization to drinking is regulated by three repeated situations of heavy domestic drinking, festive drinking, and moderate routine drinking at home. Through these situations, children acquire an ambivalent emotional contact to drinking in which the emotion of fear is strongly present. In the Swedish stories, again, children’s emotional socialization to drinking is ruled by festive situations, moderate routine drinking at home, and meal drinking on weekends. Through these situations children obtain an ambivalent emotional contact to drinking in which the emotion of fun is predominant.
Our analysis demonstrates how in Italy the emotional contact achieves such an ordinary status that most of the Italian participants are not usually able to identify an exact moment when they first encountered family members’ drinking as a child. The ordinariness of wine in everyday life settings among our Italian interviewees is also reflected by the presence of the master narrative of the wine-production process in their childhood experiences. Correspondingly, our analysis demonstrates how in an intoxicated-oriented drinking culture the presence of alcohol usually signifies something outside the bounds of everyday life. In these kinds of conditions, drinking develops a more visible role and transformative agency. As drinking often changes the ordinary course of events and family members’ mundane behavior, children’s contact with alcohol becomes more memorable, more overflowing, and more ambiguous. In this case, children develop a contact with drinking in which many kinds of positive or negative emotions can emerge.
Meal drinking appears as an unproblematic master narrative in our data from all geographical areas. In Finnish, Italian, and Swedish childhood memories, family members’ moderate alcohol consumption at mealtimes constitutes a safe contact with alcohol regarding children’s personal security in everyday life, and can include also the emotion of love. Also, moderate routing drinking at home emerges to the child as a safe contact with drinking, signifying a neutral, predictable habit of an adult. However, as our analysis reveals, while this is a common repetitive situation in the Scandinavian data, it is a very rare phenomenon in the Italian data. In the Italian childhood stories, alcohol consumption is more unanimously related to sociability and social events than in the Scandinavian stories. Instead, although alcohol consumption may also be connected to sociability, there is more space for individual drinking habits and routines (Törrönen and Härkönen, 2016). In the childhood stories from Italy, drinking alone at home is not an expected parental behavior in contrast to the childhood stories from Finland and Sweden, where it repeatedly appears as a normal parental activity.
Festive drinking rituals figure as safe or problem-producing master narratives in our data. In the Italian childhood stories, festive drinking rituals constitute a trouble-free contact to alcohol but in the Finnish and Swedish childhood stories, they are established as ambivalent contacts to drinking. While in the Italian stories of celebratory drinking situations, children experience neutral feelings or emotions of love, in the Finnish and Swedish stories of festive drinking rituals, children experience fun, fear, shame, or curiosity. The Finnish stories are dominated by fear and the Swedish stories by fun. This difference is also present in relation to other drinking situations. The Finnish focus group participants’ retrospective stories build a picture of a drinking culture that is surrounded by fear. When the Finnish interviewees tell about safe drinking situations that were neutral or produced emotions of love or fun for them as a child, they typically still feel a need to specify that the situation was not fearful. The Swedish focus group participants’ retrospective stories, in turn, build a picture of a drinking culture where drinking often intensifies the emotions of fun and love among adults and children. However, fear is not absent from this picture either. The Swedish interviewees often specify, though not as frequently as the Finnish ones, that on a specific occasion, drinking did not produce any negative consequences. In this sense, drinking also arouses ambivalent emotions among the Swedish participants.
Our findings do not suggest any remarkable country-related generational differences in how the emotional contact to drinking first developed. Older and younger participants from each country share similar kinds of childhood experiences with alcohol and their stories indicate shared emotional contacts to family members’ drinking. This suggests that in domestic drinking situations, the cultural position of alcohol has remained quite stable in the countries under study.
In our data, the Italian and Swedish drinking cultures appear more homogeneous in terms of children’s emotional acculturation to alcohol than in the Finnish drinking culture. In the Italian and Swedish data, the interviewees’ childhood emotions in relation to different drinking situations resemble each other regardless of gender, education, and age. By contrast, in the Finnish data, we see a class difference: The less educated male and female interviewees tell more stories than the more educated participants about fathers who had generated fear in their everyday life at home.
It is interesting that our focus group participants from all countries relate problem drinking in their childhood stories to male drinkers. Thus, the childhood emotions in relation to family member’s drinking build a picture of gendered drinking practices: It is the male family members’ drinking that typically causes emotional insecurity among children, threatening their safe social spaces and making them fearful. In Sweden, male family members’ drinking does not appear to be as transgressive, quarrelsome, and violent as it does in the Finnish data, and it is less of a threat to children’s safe social spaces. In Italy, male family members’ excessive drinking is associated with addiction and seen as a personal tragedy of the drinker: children rather form a contact of pity and sadness toward it than experience it fearsome. None of our interviewees from Finland, Italy, and Sweden tell childhood stories where the drinking of mothers or female relatives threatened their feelings of safety and sense of personal security in everyday life settings. Since in Finland and Sweden female alcohol consumption has increased and in Italy female alcohol consumption is about a half of that of men, we might have expected that the focus group participants would have experienced some problematic female drinking when they were children. But this is not the case in our data. Since mother’s drinking and female drinking have been and still are strongly culturally stigmatized (Roumeliotis and Törrönen, 2014), it may be that the interviewees do not want to share their experiences about that in a focus group context; or it may be that if women drink to intoxication or they have a drinking problem, they try to keep it a secret from their children (Cersosimo, 2007), in which case the children may remain oblivious to it.
To conclude, adults’ autobiographical childhood stories on family members’ drinking provide an important “indirect” source to analyze what kinds of drinking situations are safe or unsafe for children. They increase the knowledge of the citizens, parents, and authorities on what kinds of elements in drinking situations are possible dangers for children’s emotional security and specify what kinds of interventions might be effective in their elimination. Along with analyzing childhood emotions around drinking from adults’ experiences and voices, we also need research in which children themselves are interviewed and observed to assess how they emotionally experience family members’ drinking and deal with it.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper is part of the project “Drinking, Gender Differences and Social Change. The Gendered Dynamics of Finnish Drinking Culture from a Comparative Perspective” (project no. 137685, funded by the Academy of Finland), and “Drinking, Gender Differences and Social Change. The Gendered Dynamics of Swedish Drinking Situations from a Comparative Perspective” (project no 2014-0167, funded by FORTE, Sweden).