Shocking sight at a Five Star Hotel

After quite a long time due to my exams and other personal matters, I was invited by some of my close friends to have dinner at Excel World (earlier Millennium Park). Since it was a Friday and knowing the type of friends and their knack for changing sudden plans, I had a little doubt whether this will turn out to be a clubbin session as well. In fact my doubt became a reality because of the amount of money we had in our pockets and availability of enough cars to accommodate all the people. We went to one of the night clubs located within the premises of a five star hotel, and waited there until at around 12.30a.m and decided to move to another place. I was waiting with my friends in the lobby until our cars were brought back from the car park.

While we were in the lobby, a couple arrived to the reception with an approximately 3 years old male child. The couple was a mix couple and my guess is that mother was Sri Lankan though she had an Indian look and since father had a white skin, may be from the USA or UK or etc. 3 years old child looked like his mother so had a dark skin. Now to the awe-inspiring scene, father had a Carlsberg beer can in his hand and it was open. They were talking something with the receptionist and this little kid was running all over the lobby shouting and yelling out funny words. While he was running, father was signing some documents so his beer can was kept on the receptionist's table. Suddenly this little kid ran up to his beer can and started to drink it. Father and mother both had a gaze at this little kid's conduct so I thought definitely the child will be badly warned or may be spanked because the child behaved like he is in a comprehendible age to understand that beer at this age is wrong. BUT proving all my assumptions were wrong, the question asked by his mother which obviously stunned and shocked me is that "darling are you thirsty?" (a huge WTF? ran across my head) and this was asked by her while she was watching her little child drinking beer. The child didn't reply, but he had two or three sips and continued his running.

I assume for most of the people here this won't be a big issue. May be some of you all had drank beer at that age. But drinking beer at the said age with parent's consent really surprised me. May be since her husband being a foreigner, this could be a trivial issue for her. My age is 21; all my friends who go out with me are between 19-25. Still we take all the maximum precautions to avoid parent's detection when we are doing such an activity. I don't know, may be that is because I being Sinhalese and our cultural values under which we brought up are different or conservative. One can argue that i don't have a right to impose my cultural values on others. But i would like to take an objective approach to determine the correctness of that mother's conduct. This my first entry :-) will be seen as a throw away entry for most of the people who read this. I'm really sorry. But still it's startling and astonishing for me.