Safe and unsafe drinking situations through children’s eyes: Comparing recalled childhood emotions regarding family members’ drinking from Italy and Scandinavia

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.