Raising children can be stressful, and the pandemic has piled additional pressures on parents. If you’ve been feeling like drinking to cope, you’re not alone.
Here we’d like to offer a few tips on how you can manage your drinking and help your child have the best possible chance of a healthy relationship with alcohol when they are older, by setting them an example you would want them to follow.
The UK Chief Medical Officers (the top doctors) advise that both men and women should not drink more than 14 units of alcohol a week. That means no more than five or six pints of beer or cider in any one week, or about a bottle and a half of wine. They also advise spreading your drinking over three or more days and making sure you have some alcohol-free days each week.
These guidelines are exactly that – guidelines. Drinking more than 14 units some weeks doesn’t mean you’re heading for inevitable disaster; keeping under the 14 unit threshold doesn’t guarantee you everlasting good health. But if you want to keep your risk of alcohol-related health problems to a minimum, 14 units is a sensible maximum.
If you want to check how healthy your drinking is take this quick quiz.
There a few things you can do to help you cut back on your drinking:
If you’re worried that you may be drinking too much, the first thing to remember is not to blame yourself, or anyone else. There are all sorts of reasons that any of us might get into a habit of drinking too much or too often, and recognising that things might have got out of hand is the first step to getting back on track.
You can use our online drinking quiz to get an understanding of your drinking and whether you need to reduce it. It will also help you decide whether you could benefit from speaking with your GP or your local alcohol service. There is still, unfortunately, quite a bit of stigma around visiting an alcohol support service; but the truth is that all sorts of people, from all sorts of backgrounds, use these services every year to turn their lives around. Alcohol services understand the need to be discreet, confidential, and non-judgemental. You can find out about the range of support options here.
