Antismoking Parenting Practices Are Associated With Reduced Rates of Adolescent Smoking

Abstract

Parents' antismoking actions may help prevent smoking by their teenaged children.

Household Smoking Restrictions and Adolescent Smoking

“…Among GUTS participants, the association between parental smoking and adolescent smoking behaviors appears to outweigh the effect between household smoking restrictions and adolescent smoking behaviors. However, unlike several previous studies, [10][11][12] analyses stratified by parental smoking status showed no association between household smoking policy and adolescent smoking behaviors among participants with either smoking or nonsmoking parents. Although a small number of participants with nonsmoking parents also lived in homes with permissive policies (n 5 141)-which may have limited our ability to see an interaction in these subanalyses-our findings suggest that household smoking restrictions alone may not be sufficient to deter adolescent smoking.…”

Cross-Cultural Comparison of Genetic and Cultural Transmission of Smoking Initiation Using an Extended Twin Kinship Model

“…These results are consistent with the only other available twin-parent data, which also showed negative, but non-significant, cultural transmission (Boomsma et al, 1994). In fact, these results are also consistent with the vast epidemiological literature on parental smoking as a risk factor for adolescent smoking (Li et al, 2002;Peterson et al, 2005;Shakib et al, 2003;Vitaro et al, 2004) and parental non-smoking or smoking cessation as a protective factor (Andersen et al, 2004;Bricker et al, 2005;den Exter Blokland et al, 2004), derived from the moderate phenotypic correlations between parents and children or adolescents. Based on the heritability estimates from twin studies, parent-offspring correlations would be expected to be larger than they are.…”

Could adolescents be the vehicle that transfers a no-smoking rule from school to home?

“…We found that the observance of the home nosmoking rule was associated with students' lower intention to smoke in the future, in agreement with the literature, which documents that environments free from tobacco smoke protect students from exposure to secondhand smoke 8,13,22 and from the uptake of smoking behavior 3,6,12,15 . Furthermore, our school-based intervention contributed to the diffusion of tobacco control messages to students' parents and to a higher percentage of enforcement of the home no-smoking rule.…”