Mr Clarke, the last Chancellor to sip alcohol during his Budget address, reduced duty on spirits but announced a 40% increase on tax on so-called alcopops.
Letting your children sip alcohol isn't wise parenting; teaching them about responsible consumption -- whether of alcohol or food -- is.
Until such evidence is available, it would be premature to characterize childhood sipping as either a low-risk behavior that ought not to be of concern or as an appropriate target for preventative action (such as urging parents not to let their children sip alcohol).
"He was a fucking brat, an arrogant little baby who'd never sipped alcohol before, never been to a bar, and we were all these crusty fucking guys," band leader and bassist Billy Gould said.
One fan commented, rather politely really, that while they agreed with "the sentiment" it was "hard to take you seriously while you post a picture of you sipping alcohol on a yacht".
The study surveyed 561 Rhode Island middle school children over three years and found that at the age of 11, about 30% had sipped alcohol, mostly from their parents' glasses.
This week, a study from the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University in the US found that children who started sipping alcohol at the age of 11 were four times more likely to binge-drink, or have been drunk during high school, than those who hadn't tried alcohol at that age.
For the present analyses, children who had sipped alcohol only as part of religious observances were considered abstainers (approximately 15% of all sippers; see Donovan and Molina, 2008).
Age of sipping initiation was established by determining at what wave of data collection the child first reported sipping alcohol in a nonreligious context and then confirmed this in the next wave (6 months later).
Children who had sipped or tasted alcohol were asked to click on all contexts in which they had sipped alcohol, including as part of a religious observance, with family at dinner, as part of a family celebration or party, with friends, by themselves, and somewhere else.
In our own earlier research, we found that children who had sipped alcohol by age 10 (i.e., at an even younger age than examined here) were almost twice as likely as other children to start drinking (more than a sip) before age 15 (Donovan and Molina, 2011).
