When Chloe Green (not her real name), 23, thinks back to her childhood in Scarborough, she remembers the sound of the front door before anything else. The scrape of keys, the weight behind the hinge, the way it shut. Those small cues shaped her whole world.

“I learned very young that the sound of the door told me everything,” she says. “If it slammed, I’d hide. If it was quiet, I knew they were trying not to wake me. That was how I knew what kind of night it would be.”

Chloe’s parents were alcohol dependent throughout her childhood. There were no dramatic scenes, no images like the ones often used on charity posters. Instead, she grew up with constant unpredictability. Conversations forgotten. Moods that turned quickly. Days that felt steady until suddenly they were not.

“I used to think, they’re not passed out on the floor, so maybe this isn’t really a problem,” she says. “But it was the inconsistency that hurt the most.”

That misunderstanding is common, says Mark Hindwell of Forward Leeds, one of the UK’s largest drug and alcohol services. “People imagine alcohol dependency as someone on the street with a bottle of vodka,” he says. “But most of the people we support are lecturers, doctors, parents, highly functioning people who might have a few pints at lunch just to get through the afternoon.”

National data suggests Chloe’s experience is far from rare.

A UK Parliament research briefing estimates between 189,000 and 208,000 children in England live with an alcohol dependent adult. But charities say the number of children affected by hazardous or harmful drinking more broadly may reach 3 million. 

Chloe was one of them. She often became the stabilising force in the house, even though she was a child herself. “I cooked meals, I mediated their arguments and I hid bags of empty cans each morning.” 

Teachers called her mature. They did not know she was keeping her home afloat. “Adults think kids don’t understand,” she says. “But kids understand everything. Sometimes too much.”

Mr Hindwell says the language we use perpetuates the stigma. “We still use words like alcoholic or addict,” he says. “We use people first language everywhere else, you know people with disabilities, things like that but with addiction there’s still a stigma.”

He also says British drinking culture hides the scale of the problem. “There is an off licence or pub on every road. Most Christmas or birthday cards have drink jokes on the front. Bottomless brunches encourage people to drink as much as they can as fast as they can. Alcohol dependency is socially acceptable in a way no other drug is.”

For adults, help does not always mean quitting entirely. “About half of the people we see come because they think they are drinking too much and want to cut down,” Mr Hindwell says. “Dependency exists on a spectrum. One in 30 adults in Leeds has used our service for alcohol or drug support. It is everywhere, even if people do not talk about it.”

Chloe’s parents eventually sought help when she was 17 and remained in recovery. But processing what happened has taken her much longer. “For a long time I thought they weren’t choosing me,” she says. “But addiction doesn’t work like that.”

Accessing support herself changed things. “The first time someone said, ‘That must have been hard,’ I cried,” she says. “Nobody had ever said it like it mattered.”

Today she works in childcare, a decision that has helped her rebuild her sense of what a safe home looks like. “Being around children is healing,” she says. “It reminds me what childhood should be.”

When asked what she would tell a young person living the way she once did, she pauses. “It’s not your job to fix adults,” she says at last. “And you deserve safety, even if you have to find it somewhere else.”