ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on children's knowledge and understanding of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness addressing three questions: what do pre-teen children know about alcohol and how do they learn about alcohol and its associated potential harms? It shows that while parents/carers are ambivalent about talking to pre-teen children about drinking, regarding them as too young for such discussions, the children themselves have developed a competent understanding of alcohol and the circumstances under which children and adults may drink. Much of this knowledge about alcohol has been gleaned by children through proximal processes, namely their daily interactions with parents/carers/older siblings in the context of everyday family life and from the media. The spatiality of children's moral distinction between the meaning of drunkenness at home, compared with public space shows that there is a potentially problematic disassociation between children's understandings of the potential negative effects of drinking to excess and everyday family practices.
