When I was a kid, my parents would sit on the porch and smoke cigarettes to unwind after a long day at work. My grandfather would smoke cigarettes while reading and drinking iced tea or coffee. Some of my aunts and uncles would smoke cigarettes whenever their kids played in the backyard.
I suppose it’s fitting that I had my first cigarette at 15, and if a recent study published in the “American Journal of Public Health” means anything, my parents are likely to have been influential in my decision to pick up my smoking habit.
According to the study, children of smokers are three times more likely to try a cigarette and twice as likely to become nicotine-dependent than children of parents who never smoked. From personal experience, this makes tons of sense. My parents were smokers and so were the parents of a lot of kids I knew growing up… many of which became smokers themselves.
The study combed through eight years of data accumulated by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual poll conducted on nearly 70,000 people ages 12 and older who were selected at random. The authors of the study analyzed 35,000 responses by parent-adolescent pairs in order to determine what connections, if any, could be made between the smoking habits of parents and their children.
Only 13 percent of children whose parents have never smoked reported having tried at least one cigarette in their lifetime and only five percent of those children would become nicotine-addicted. Comparatively, 38 percent of children whose parents currently or formerly smoke cigarettes have tried at least one cigarette in their lifetime and 15 percent would become nicotine-addicted.
That’s a staggering difference.
More findings spoke to gender differences. Teen daughters are four times more likely to smoke cigarettes when their mothers are the parent who is nicotine-dependent, not their fathers. Comparatively, teen sons were equally likely to smoke cigarettes regardless of which parent was nicotine-dependent.
These links remained nearly as strong when other factors, such as drug and alcohol use, were accounted for. The authors of the study found that variables such as the marital status, education, and mental health status of parents who smoke cigarettes were influential in their children’s decision to smoke cigarettes. However, due to the nature of the study, the authors were unable to examine links between peers who smoke cigarettes, households where both parents smoked, and the effects of cigarette advertising.
The authors also found that while many kids choose to smoke cigarettes as a means to emulate their parents’ habits, parents who had quit also had higher rates of children who would become smokers, implying a possible genetic predisposition to nicotine dependency.
While the study has not accommodated every factor that may influence teens to smoke cigarettes, it effectively laid-bare the influence parents have on their children. While teenagers may run off at the mouth about how much they hate their parents or attempt to largely ignore their parents, the things mom and dad do during those years are influential. My parents didn’t quit smoking until just before I picked it up and my grandfather, with whom I spent a significant amount of time, continued to smoke cigarettes until the day he died. While my first cigarette was given to me by one of my friends, she had to have picked up the habit from somewhere and since I have never possessed any evidence of an adolescent conspiracy to get everyone hooked on cigarettes, I always figured these nicotine habits came from the fact our parents were all smokers.
While concluding the effects of peers is important in understanding the psychology of adolescents who smoke cigarettes, this study is also important in determining one of the largest, and perhaps most influential, factors — if your parents have smoked cigarettes or currently smoke cigarettes, you are more likely to do so. If you have smoked cigarettes or currently smoke cigarettes, your kids are more likely to do so.
And with that, it is time for me to step outside for a few minutes.
