Alcoholism affects not only the individuals who depend on it, but also their families. Children who have an alcohol dependent parent have various problems and need help, but little attention has been given to them. Many references report only negative characteristics of these children. In order to help the children of alcohol dependent parents, health professionals need more information. A wholistic understanding and analysis of these children is needed as a basis for the development of suitable programs of help them. A phenomenological methodology was used to identify the experience of children whose fathers were addicted to alcohol. The findings portray the essence of the lived experience of children of alcohol dependent fathers. Nine adolescents participated in in-depth inverviews and observation with the researcher, done between October and December 2001. The data were recorded on audio tape and transcribed. Sampling was continued until the data were theorectically saturated. The Colaizzi's method was used for data analysis. The results of this study are as follows. Three themes and twenty six meanings were identified. The first theme is Living Alone: living abusively as partner to an alcohol dependent father, living dangerously like an explosive fury, living as an object that ha no self, living with rejection of fatherly being, living with felt responsibility but having no power to help mother who suffers patiently with pain and abuse, living along with no shoulder to lean on, and living with the prejudice of sex discrimination. The second theme is Paradoxical Coping in Life. The meanings are obsessive behavior as a way to control father's behavior, always on the defensive due to anxiety and tension, being afraid of life alone due to paranoid thoughts, contradictory expectation about father's drinking behavior due to life with chronic tension, stress becoming familiar and life being boring and tendious without stimulation, life that is fake and filled with misinterpretations about reality, affection sought from others due to loneliness, compensatory life within peer group, negative expectation about the future due to negative experiences, controling others to protect ego, denial of real emotion to protect self from hurt, life of regretting self, and strong need for approval from others. The third theme is sustaining life. The meanings are ambivalence between revenge on father and pity, struggle for desirable self against fear of gather-like image, understanding father through self reflection, hope to find fatherly being through father's recovery, being able to stand through emotional control and cognitive restructuring, nurturing the seed of hope for the future while in a situation of desperation. The contribution of this study is to give a wholistic understanding of the empirical reality of children of alcohol dependent parents and to develop substantive theory in nursing knowledge. In nursing practice, the results of this study can provide a foundation for the development of programs for children of alcohol dependent parents.