Children Start Smoking Because of their Parents

Published on February 6, 2009 4:10 AM

A new research showed that more adolescents start smoking if their parents smoke too.  Researchers investigated a group of teenagers and found that the smoking effect was particularly strong if young people were exposed to a parent's tobacco use before their teen years.
But they also found that in children of ex-smokers parents the risk of starting smoking disappear.
Researchers found enough evidences that children of cigarettes smokers are more likely to be smokers themselves, but they found very little about whether one parent has a stronger effect than the other, and whether the influence of parents on their offspring's smoking behavior is the same throughout childhood and adolescence. That’s why they continue investigation.
They looked at 559 boys and girls ages 12 to 17-years-old. The researchers also spoke with one parent of each adolescent participant.
At the end of the investigation they found that among parents, 62.4 percent had ever smoked in their lives, while 46 percent had met criteria for nicotine dependence during their lifetime.
But among adolescents 27.8 percent reported having used cigarettes, with the prevalence of use increasing with age, 7.2 percent of 12-year-olds said they had smoked, while 61.3 percent of 17-year-olds did.
Each parent independently influenced the likelihood that a young person would start smoking, the researchers found. A mother's smoking affected sons and daughters' risk equally, but a father's smoking had a stronger effect on boys than girls, and the smoking habits of fathers who did not live with their families had no affect on offspring's smoking risk.
The longer a parent smoked, the greater an adolescent's likelihood of starting smoking.