Well that surprised me

Totally agree Bluebelle!

Presumably it means a sip or two? It does seem a strange law though doesn’t it? One that needs updating.

5 is way too young but I see no harm in watered down wine at a meal for 10 and over. It's quiet common in the rest of Europe. I feel it stops them experimenting with stronger drink.

Yes nina, in Italy they start them early. The children are taught to respect alcohol from a young age at dinner tables along with their parents.

Our young teenage DGS enjoyed a drop of wine with our Christmas meal, it’s getting them to associate a little alchohol as a pleasurable and sociable thing to do, like a long family meal with talk and laughter.

Are you from Italy Ellan ?
I love watching their family meals out.

No lemongrove but I have Italian friends.

I had publican parents (Mum and step father also my Father and step mother). Alcohol was never a big deal
for our generation.

We took our children and they (and us) have always taken GC out to eat, and to child friendly country pubs.

Consequently they know how to behave and have always had “little sips” of our drinks.

My DB would happily drink a glass of sherry from the age of about 6 - it was only offered to us at Xmas, I think. I took a sip and hated it.
My DS, at 3, had tiny sips of cider from a teaspoon one Xmas - and became quite cheery and red-cheeked (Me too, ).

I think another way to look at it is that it’s illegal to give alcohol to an under-5.

My son at 3 had sips of cider from a teaspoon Why?

It seems a shame that our society requires laws for things which should be common sense.
Who would feed alcohol to a small child? I guess the same people who smoke around them and, dare I say it, let them play with bull terriers.
Maybe children have to be protected and their carers guided by laws.

It doesn't need to be illegal. Harming a child is illegal. That covers causing a child harm with alcohol.

There doesn't need to be a law about everything undesirable.

I'm not sure a taste of an alcoholic drink would harm a child anyway. Most kids would probably hate it, just as most of them hate cabbage.

I work on the principle that people should be free to do whatever they like so long as it doesn't harm anyone else. (Harm to the shared environment would count as harming others.)

?

Stop complicating the issue. The law simply states it’s illegal to give alcohol to a child under 5 years of age.

Simple. I didn’t need it to turn into a quasi-philosophical debate.

My family was part French. Wine with a meal was not unusual. And children were able to taste it (watered), and see that it was possible to drink alcohol sensibly.

But perhaps other people did 'need' (or just want) it to be a quasi philosophical debate, anja. Those don't do any harm either.

My now retired GP brother let his kids have small amounts of wine too. They're a strong strapping healthy adult bunch now.

When the grandchildren were younger ( 6/7?) they would always ask " what's that like" I'd say " have a sip" they would recoil in horror: yuk yuk
They soon stopped asking.

My beloved granddaughter aged thirteen was allowed a tiny amount of pink champagne in a champagne flute, unbeknown to us at the time she put it on Instagram, she is now in serious trouble from her parents

I still have a small liqueur glass that my grandfather gave me the Christmas I was 7, to drink a small portion of raisin wine from.
I don’t think I suffered in any way.

It could be that this is an ancient law – there are still a lot of them – brought about to protect babies from the practice of putting gin (and laudanum) in a baby's bottle to get her/him off to sleep.

"In the olden days" - really long ago, there was no such thing as fresh tap water.
So what did children drink then?
Having said that I remember being given a sip of port wine by my grandad and thinking 'yuk'.