ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the transmission of attitudes and practices relating to alcohol in everyday family life. It also focuses on parents'/carers' ideals of how family life and alcohol consumption should be, in order to understand the complexities and contradictions of the ways in which parents, carers and adults model attitudes and practices about alcohol to children. The chapter suggests that the family is a significant influence on the timing of young people's first consumption of alcohol. It focuses on the transmission of attitudes and practices in everyday family life – an aspect of social reproduction that has been relatively neglected – through the lens of alcohol. The emphasis parents/carers placed on choice does not however recognise that an individual's drinking can impact on many other lives beyond his/ her own and consequently it does not acknowledge the wider shared social responsibilities of adults or children.
