In a way I'm sitting on the fence too, because I don't think the take on this particular problem is going to be that decisive for our children's future relationship to alcohol. I wouldn't feel remiss if I hadn't let ds have a sip, but I don't feel remiss because I did IYSWIM.
I do wonder though, why some poster assume that if you give your 7yo a sip of wine it's because you can't say no? I can say no perfectly happily and have no difficulty explaining why a second sip would do him harm where a first won't. I also explain that a first glass is fine for me, but that a second is more than my body can cope with. And that there is a safe limit for everybody, depending on age and health. Why would that be difficult to explain? He sees that Daddy and I respect our limits, so why shouldn't he?
Also, he knows if he has been given a sip once to find out what it tastes like, that doesn't mean he can have it every time. He's also tasted coffee and he's not allowed to drink that every day.
I do not believe letting him have his sip is a magic talisman that will keep him off the booze forever- but I don't think it's going to turn him into an alcoholic either. There are much more important aspects of my parenting that are more likely to decide his relationship to alcohol later on.
When teenagers go binge drinking, it's usually not about liking the taste of wine or beer. It is, as it always was, about not having the confidence to stand out from their mates. Being new to the taste is not much of a deterrent to a teenager- or how come so many people in my generation took up smoking? Besides, alcopops mean that disliking wine isn't going to be much of a barrier.
I was allowed liqueur chocolates when I was a child, and brandy butter with the Christmas pudding- that is probably a very similar alcohol intake to the few sips of wine he's had, but it hasn't turned me into a surreptitious brandy sipper.
As for the way people speak about the past, as if heavy drinking was something new- was I the only one whose teenage mates were legless every weekend? Was my dh's family the only one where the parents fell asleep over the bottle of whisky following the wine on a Sunday afternoon? Was there really no teenage binge drinking in the 1970's? Or are people perhaps wearing rosetinted spectacles?
I think the truth is that people were simply more lax about alcohol in the past. Not everybody, there have always been teetotal families, but society as a whole. The drinking of dh's family is not part of any statistics, becase nobody thought it was odd at the time. When I worked in this country in the 1980s, it was an accepted thing among my work mates to drink and drive, because it was unheard of that somebody would refrain from drinking just because they were driving. And these were respectable academics, without any social problems. (I might add that most young people I met at the time seemed to smoke pot.)
When my FIL got pneumonia a few decades earlier, his GP attempted to cure it with whisky (having first misdiagnosed it as broken ribs). He also swigged liberally himself- drinking on the job was considered acceptable for a GP at the time.
I think that our children will be growing up in a world that is very similar to ours in one respect: it is full of temptations and you need to exercise selfconfidence and judgment. We can give them the facts. We can provide models of responsible attitudes to drink (including not drinking at all). And we can ourselve be models of independence in the face of peer pressure. But the ultimate decision will be theirs.