Would you hand your kid a cigarette?

Parents are very influencial on their children (Green et al, 1991, p.745). From personal experiences I can somewhat relate this to smoking - As a little girl I use to pretend my lollypop-stick was a cigarette when acting as a lady, as my Mum. Some of the people interviewed also agreed that their parents did contribute to their starting of smoking, especially mothers. Graham states that mothers' play a powerful influence on childrens' smoking behaviour (1987, p.47). If smoking is so bad on health, why would a mother want their child smoking? They don't, as mentioned by smoking mothers who participated in interviews. Then if a parent smoking influences a child to smoke, does it not make sense to quit? Although irrelevant to smoking, I find that the concept of the advertisement below would be useful if applied in a anti-smoking campaign. Here ads could better demonstrate the impact smoking has on their children.




Another issue is passive smoking. Passive smoking dramatically impacts childrens' health (Knight et al, 1996, p.446). Quitline has started focussing on this issue (see image below). By focussing on the children and family, rather than on the smoker, anti-smoking commercials could better reach parent smokers.

                                           

Image: http://www.who.int/tobacco/healthwarningsdatabase/tobacco_medium_australia_children_02_b_en/en/index.html
References:
- Graham, H. 1987, 'Women's smoking and family health' in Social Science & Medicine, Vol.25, No., pp.47-56, Accessed 30/09/2010, http://www.sciencedirect.com/
- Green, G., Macintyre, S., West, P. & Ecob, R. 1991, 'Like parent like child? Associations between drinking and smoking behaviour of parents and their children' in British Journal of Addiction, Vol.86, No.6, pp.745-758, Accessed 30/09/2010, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
- Knight, J.M., Eliopoulos, C., Klein, J., Greenwald, M. & Koren, G. 1996,'Passive Smoking in Children' in Chest, Vol.109, No.2, pp.446-450, Accessed 30/09/2010, http://chestjournal.chestpubs.org/