Child smoking link to bad behavior
It’s middle school where kids come under most pressure to try their first cigarette – and if your child does so by the time she reaches seventh grade, new research suggests she’s more likely to get hooked on the habit. Most alarmingly, it could set her on the road to high-risk behavior as a teen.
“We were struck by the degree to which early smoking appeared to indicate that kids were on the fast track toward a troubled adolescence,” says Phyllis Ellickson, PhD, who led the team of researchers at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. “We wanted to find out what factors in early and later adolescence might help these high-risk kids avoid negative consequences.”
The researchers collected data at seventh, 10th and 12th grade from 2000 students in California and Oregon, who were early smokers in middle school. At the beginning of middle school, 30% of the early smokers had recently used cigarettes, 14% were smoking regularly and 21% had multiple school problems. Having peers who smoked was found to be a strong risk factor for becoming a regular smoker. At-risk teens were two or more times more likely than teens who hadn’t tried smoking by seventh grade to have peers who smoked, and five times more likely to have had two or more problems in school.
“At seventh grade level, problems in school included being sent out of the classroom more than once, skipping school multiple times and absenteeism,” Ellickson says.
By the end of high school, 36% of early smokers were smoking regularly and 58% had engaged in two or more problem behaviors, including binge drinking, abusing and selling drugs and dropping out of school.
The researchers found that teens who hadn’t tried smoking by seventh grade were 1.5 times more likely to be those who had good grades and lived in an intact family. In other words, good grades – B or higher – and living in an intact family helped protect early smokers against these negative outcomes.
The RAND researchers concluded that teens whose parents disapproved of smoking and drug use had lower risks of problem behavior. They suggested that universal prevention programs that target peer resistance and parental involvement could help reverse the trends found in the study.
The study appears in the October issue of the
Journal of Adolescent Health.