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Articles - Smoking and Teens
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Preventing Your Child From Smoking

Talking with children about the dangers of smoking can help prevent them from smoking, but it is difficult for kids to relate to diseases that may not occur until middle and late adulthood.

So what can a parent do? Some of the best data regarding teens smoking and parental involvement comes from a 1997 study published in Journal of American Medicine titled “The National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health.” This study looked at protective and risk factors associated with nicotine use among teens.

Protective factors for decreased nicotine use in grades seven through 12 include:

  • increased parental presence in the home

  • teens with high levels of “connectedness” to their parents

  • teens that reported a greater number of shared activities with their parents

  • personal importance placed upon religion and prayer

  • high self-esteem

  • high levels of feeling “connected” at school

Smoking and other drugs

Smoking cigarettes is also associated with the abuse of other drugs. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 12- to 17-year-olds who smoked cigarettes were about eight times as likely to use illicit drugs and 11 times as likely to drink heavily compared to nonsmoking youth.

The role of cigarette smoking trains the brain and prepares the lungs for smoking marijuana. To inhale and hold hot smoke in the lung long enough for the psychoactive constituents to be absorbed requires that the user resist the biological urge to cough. Once the brain and lungs are trained on cigarettes, it becomes biological cakewalk to smoking marijuana, crack or even heroin.

Considering the enormous positive impact that parental involvement, non-drug using peers and prayer have on the prevalence of cigarette and marijuana use, it seems shortsighted to continue a prevention strategy aimed solely at drug education. A renewed effort to prevent the onset of drug use should be directed toward values, parental education, parental involvement as well as community or religious-based monitoring, and mentoring programs that compensate for deficits in parental involvement and supervision.

By Drew Edwards, MS and Mark S. Gold, MD
© 1999 University of Florida McKnight Brain Institute