Parents' Alcohol Consumption and Children's Knowledge of Drinks and Usage Patterns

Summary Although many workers have speculated about the nature of parental drinking models upon the development of attitudes towards, and knowledge of, alcoholic drink amongst children, there has until recently been no systematic study of these precise issues. In the present study, parents' own self‐reported alcohol consumption was compared with children's knowledge of specific drinks and normative usage patterns. Whilst developmental trends were discerned in the results, most of the children made correct discriminations overall, very few scoring zero or negative (reversed) discrimination scores. Exhaustive examination of the data failed to reveal any consistent pattern of relationships between children's knowledge and the drinking model provided by their own parents. Precisely the same result was obtained from a similar study carried out by Penrose [5] in the U.S.A., One can therefore have some confidence in the negative finding, which has important implications for health education.