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A new study in the September issue of the journal Pediatrics reports evidence that parents can negatively or positively influence whether their children become smokers. In particular, parents may play a large role in determining whether their adolescent children progress from experimenting with cigarettes in the eighth grade to daily smoking by the 12th grade.

The study included 270 adolescents who had begun smoking by the eighth grade but who were not yet daily smokers at that time. Of the participants, 156 (58 percent) became daily smokers by the 12th grade.

Min Jung Kim, a research scientist with the University of Washington's Social Development Research Group and lead author of the study, commented on the findings: "If parents smoke, teens have more access to cigarettes than teens who have non-smoking parents. A second preventive measure for smoking parents is to quit smoking themselves ... If parents really don't want their children to smoke they need to communicate that by establishing clear guidelines in their families about not smoking and discuss them with their school-age children."

(Source: insciences.org)

Labels: teen smoking, parents, smoking

Posted By: Aspen Education Group