Of course it came from the parents.  Or it was there and the parents were just completely oblivious.  When I was a kid, my best friend (and next-door neighbor) had his bedroom moved downstairs to the basement when Grandma came to live with them.  We were about 10 when this happened, and totally stoked about being able to play Ping-Pong any time we wanted!

Said basement also boasted a full bar and beer taps.  I don't know if his parents ever even realized why their house suddenly became THE place to hang out.

I must be a late bloomer then, because I never tasted alcohol until high school (and it was literally a cpuple of sips) and I didn't drink until college.

As a postscript to that, the whole gang of us turned out pretty okay.  We still keep in touch, nobody is in jail, and we have all grown into reasonable facsimilies of adults.  Maybe the mystique was taken out of alcohol, and therefore none of us really felt the need to go overboard (excepting college, of course).  

Last night, when my husband and I were sharing a beer, my 4-year-old asked for a sip. Nope! Why not? Uh, it's illegal! How old do I have to be to drink beer? 21! So my 7-year-old pipes up, When I'm 21 I'm going to drink a beer.

Did someone script this?

I remember "tasting" alcohol at a very young age. I would beg my dad to let me dip my finger in his beer or have a sip of his wine. I didn't like it too much, and alcohol was never a focal point in our home. I didn't start drinking until college.

Um, sure there's such a thing as a harmless sip of alcohol when you're ten.  In my experience, both as a child and as a parent, tasting alcohol merely convinces the child that adults are crazy to drink it because it generally tastes awful to kids.  Is there any credible evidence that letting a kid have a sip of mom or dad's drink leads in a direct line to living under a bridge drinking out of a paper bag, or to some other harmful consequence?  I'd think it'd be at least as likely that keeping it as a mysterious forbidden fruit would only increase the allure.  I remember my dad giving me a taste of his Scotch when I was a kid, and once I knew it tasted the way gasoline smelled I was happy to leave it to him.

Of *course* parents shouldn't wait until a kid is a teenager to begin discussing alcohol with them.  It's part of our society and many parents drink, at least at the wine-with-dinner or beer-at-the-game level.  If you're having a glass of wine with dinner, it's a perfect opportunity to discuss with your children the fact that alcohol, like so many other things, is OK in moderation but harmful in excess, and that it's not for children.  I'm pregnant, and I've told my five-year-old that the reason I'm not drinking any alcohol right now is because it's OK for grown-up bodies but not for kid bodies, and it's especially bad for babies.  He's so safety-conscious that he was worried the other day when I added some wine to a stew for dinner!  And yes, he's tasted his dad's beer, made a face, and never asked again.  I can't imagine why that's a problem.