Mother, Alcohol Use and COVID-19: Do They Tie In?

How has drinking behavior changed in mothers during COVID-19? Mothers drank alcohol less frequently but more drinks per day.

Mothers drank alcohol less frequently as the COVID-19 pandemic progressed, according to a small study of Ohio women, but another result was more concerning to researchers.

Findings showed that the number of drinks per day increased for moms later in the pandemic, raising concerns that mothers may have been more likely to binge when they did drink.

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‘Mothers may have used alcohol to cope with the confinement and social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.’

The COVID-19 pandemic was especially stressful for parents, as they juggled working from home and taking care of their children. The new study gives a glimpse of how some mothers used alcohol to cope as the pandemic went on. The findings were published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.

The researchers recruited 266 mothers in central Ohio for a study on parenting during April-May 2020 when Ohio was under stay-at-home orders for the pandemic. Participants, who all had children between 2 and 12 years of age, were recruited via social media and word-of-mouth, so it was not a random sample.

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Most of the sample consisted of white, well-educated, and married women. The mothers participated in three waves of the study: the first in spring 2020 and again at about the same time in 2021 and 2022.

Overall, 77.8% of the mothers reported alcohol use over all three waves of the study. This study doesn’t have data from before COVID-19, but previous work showed that alcohol use increased among women after the start of the pandemic.

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In addition, other research finds that drinking among women has been increasing over the last two decades, especially among white women and the highly educated.

Results of this new study showed that, among women who used alcohol, participants drank on an average of 9.2 days of the previous 28 days at the start of the stay-at-home orders in 2022. Drinking frequency dropped to 6.95 days in 2021 and stayed about the same in 2022.

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Total drinking volume also decreased from 2020 to the final two years of the study. However, the average number of drinks per day increased from 1.47 in 2020 to 1.65 in 2021 and stayed steady at 1.61 in 2022.

The study can’t say why the changes in alcohol use occurred throughout the pandemic. But the results are troubling, particularly considering the trends of increased drinking among women even before the pandemic began.

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Alcohol use already going up, and then this pandemic added enforced confinement and social isolation to the already difficult job of parenting.

Hence, it is not surprising that some mothers may have used alcohol to help them cope, but it is known that binge drinking especially can have bad effects on parenting. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Source-Eurekalert