Mal Fletcher comments

It may be better for a teenager to have his or her first drink in the relative safety of the home, but the problem is that drink is turned into a rite of passage. In many of the families represented in the Australian study, parents would have seen allowing the teen to drink as a mark of recognition that they'd reached adulthood.

I see no reason to believe that the situation is any different in the UK.

As long as we continue to see drinking as a sign of maturity, young people will be drawn to it - and given a false sense of security in its presence.

Of course, the problem may start much younger than the teenage years. On the whole, smaller children tend to learn more watching us than they do listening to us.

They read into our behaviour a reflection of our core values. They assume that our actions are always a consistent reflection of what we believe to be right. When they see inevitable inconsistencies between what we say and do they're quick to point these out.

It's not so much that they're looking for signs of hypocrisy; they're simply wired somehow to watch our actions more than listen to our words. Before they learn to fully understand language, they're already learning to imitate actions. This offers a protection mechanism: they don't need to comprehend everything we say in order to avoid every little danger around the house.

If children and young teens constantly see us using alcohol in an offhand way, they'll take that as a sign that we think alcohol is harmless. And they'll trust our judgement on this.

For their sakes as well as our own, we need to show by our actions that we can enjoy alcohol without losing respect for its potential to wreak havoc.

Of course, parents and guardians no longer operate as the only shapers of their children's values. If a recent Ofcom study is correct and children spend 2000 hours every year in front of screens, 1200 with family and 900 in school, the influence of digital media on their values is possibly as great as that of family and formal education put together.

So, the media have an important role to play here. Given the propensity of young people to align their behaviour with that of celebrities, producers must stop insisting that their storylines merely reflect cultural mores.

They must own up to reinforcing and shaping those values, especially among the young, for whom fantasy is often more real than reality.

There is also the influence of peer pressure to consider. In some young social circles, not drinking, or drinking in moderation, is seen as a major faux pas.

But let's not pretend that peer pressure stops when you reach the age of 18 or 20. We are all social creatures; our choices are at least in part shaped by the values of our cultural milieu. This fact has been borne out time and again in studies around the world.

The power of acculturation can lead us to do things we might not do if given the same choices in an isolated place. Whatever our age, when it comes to alcohol consumption we need to be conscious of the pressure to conform and place self-respect above popularity.