We go to pubs, and he knows I drink lager. He certainly isn't picking it up from his father, who hardly drinks at all. Perhaps he is picking it up from his friends at school. That is definitely where he has acquired his alarmingly precocious knowledge of human anatomy.

When your six-year-old knows how to order a drink, you realise that you have to take personal responsibility not only for yourself, but for your children.

Although a group of MPs this week called for a ban on "happy hour" drink promotions, and for measures to stop supermarkets selling alcohol at a loss to encourage shoppers through the doors, I think they are missing the point. Ban what you like, but drinkers will still find a way to drink. It is all about getting an individual to take control of what and how much they consume.

We live in a culture which sees getting drunk as a human right. It has been like this for at least a thousand years, and we are not going to change overnight into a nation of cappuccino-drinkers. It is finding the middle way, between measuring out your life in nanny-state units and the stupidity of drunken glass fights – that is the real challenge.

This is where personal responsibility comes in. The Government can come up with any campaign it likes, but the reaction of most people to any poster which tells them to cut down their units is to avert their eyes and carry on pouring the drinks. Research shows that it is peer pressure, or a major health scare, which forces people to reduce their alcohol intake.

And we have to retain some perspective. What would life be like without a party? No government campaign is going to stop an office get-together in the pub after work or get through to a bunch of young people out on a Friday night.

The most recent Home Office campaign, aimed at 18-24 year-olds, has had a good go. A young woman is seen passed out alone on a bench, a young man smashes up a kebab shop. It has been running since the summer, but has it made any perceptible difference to the town centre where you
live on a Saturday night? I thought not.

Impressive though it is, such campaigns are a case of shutting the door after the horse has bolted. If the Government hadn't given supermarkets and off-licences carte blanche to sell unlimited cheap booze in the
first place, or allowed bars to sell three, or even four, drinks
for the price of one, then we wouldn't be in this state. And what a liberty it is for this Government which introduced 24-hour drinking to then tell people that it's a bad idea to drink around the clock after all.

I can't help but think that when we had good old-fashioned licensing laws, we didn't have 13-year-olds rolling round in their own vomit.

Now we have perfectly respectable adults who are so fed up of being dictated to in every other area of their life that they have stopped listening, and regard their alcohol intake as the last bastion of their freedom. And there are others who are so disjointed from life that they don't even register that someone is trying to get through to them; these people, especially youngsters, don't watch the news or see newspaper advertisements.

So in this climate, encouraging personal responsibility is vital. But how to do it? Peer pressure for the first group, and education from the earliest age for the second are the answers.

Almost everyone I know around my age has cut down on their drinking, usually as the result of a health problem experienced by themselves or someone close. The Government, in the midst of its moral panic, might be surprised to learn that some of us are capable of making a decision for ourselves.

And as for our children, well, never mind all the fuss about sex education. If you ask me, they are never too young to learn the facts about alcohol, as my own six-year-old proves. And alcohol abuse leads to so many other problems, from unwanted pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases to anti-social behaviour.

Parents have a role to play, of course. But put alcohol at the centre of personal and social education at primary school, and teach children about the effects and consequences. They already know how to order a drink. What they need is to learn how to handle it.