Are you raising a smoker?

Smoke signals…

If you smoke in your home you could be setting a bad example your child will follow as he reaches adolescence, says a new study. But on the other hand, banning smoking in the home (and not sneaking the odd cigarette when you think your child isn’t looking) may help your child to develop an antismoking attitude that means he’s way less likely to experiment when he hits his teens.

“Having a home smoking ban reduced the odds that an adolescent would begin to experiment with cigarettes but only in homes that did not contain smokers,” says Dr Alison Albers, of Boston University School of Public Health. Dr Albers and her research team asked 3,834 children, age 12 to 17, what they thought about smoking and compared the results to whether or not the children lived with smoking or nonsmoking parents, and whether smoking was banned in the family home.

Follow-up interviews carried out two years later with 73% of the kids, and a further two years on with 58% of the original participants indicated that adolescents living in a home where there wasn’t a total ban on smoking were more likely to consider the habit socially acceptable. The ban was all-important – even kids whose parents were nonsmokers were more likely to experiment with smoking over time when they lived in homes without a smoking ban.

The researchers say that preventing teens and younger children from experimenting with smoking may depend on parents instituting a clear and consistent smoking-is-not-acceptable message - this means having parents who don’t smoke and who completely ban smoking in the family home.

The study is published in the American Journal of Public Health, October 2008.

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