Fathers’ Views and Experiences of Creating a Smoke-Free Home: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Enabling parents to create a smoke-free home is one of the key ways that children’s exposure to second-hand smoke (SHS) can be reduced. Smoke-free home interventions have largely targeted mothers who smoke, and there is little understanding of the barriers and facilitators that fathers experience in creating a smoke-free home. Systematic searches combining terms for fathers, homes, and SHS exposure were run in April 2019 in Web of Science’s Citation Indices, PsycINFO, and PubMed for English-language studies published since 2008. The searches identified 980 records for screening, plus 66 records from other sources. Twelve studies reported in 13 papers were included in this scoping review. Eight of the studies were conducted in Asian countries (five in China, one in India, one in Japan, and one in Iran), three were conducted in Canada, and one in Turkey. Findings were extracted in verbatim text for thematic analysis. The review identified that attitudes and knowledge, cultural and social norms, gender power relations, and shifting perceptions and responsibilities related to fatherhood can impact on fathers’ views of their role in relation to creating and maintaining a smoke-free home. There were too few published studies that had assessed smoke-free home interventions with fathers to draw conclusions regarding effective approaches. Research is clearly needed to inform our understanding of fathers’ roles, successes and challenges in creating and maintaining a smoke-free home, so that father-inclusive rather than mother-led interventions can be developed to benefit entire households and improve gender equity as well as health.

Supporting parents living in disadvantaged areas of Edinburgh to create a smoke-free home using nicotine replacement therapy (NRT): A two-phase qualitative study.

“…A few participants informally shared their NRT with their partner at home, during the course of the study. Whilst this was not formally encouraged, this approach ts with recent calls for future SFH interventions to be delivered at the household level, rather than being largely mother-led [31,32]. Developing SFH interventions that work with men, women and other family members on an equal basis, could better frame household smoking as a collective responsibility, and so take the pressure off women as mothers and wives to persuade others to take their smoking outside [12].…”

Supporting Parents Living in Disadvantaged Areas of Edinburgh to Create a Smoke-Free Home Using Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT): A Two-Phase Qualitative Study

“…A few participants informally shared their NRT with their partner at home, during the course of the study. Whilst this was not formally encouraged, this approach fits with recent calls for future smoke-free home interventions to be delivered at household level, rather than being largely mother-led [ 33 , 34 ]. Developing smoke-free home interventions that work with men, women, and other family members on an equal basis could better frame household smoking as a collective responsibility, and so take the pressure off women as mothers and wives to persuade others to take their smoking outside [ 13 ].…”

Missing in Action: Sex and Gender in Substance Use Research

“…O'Donnell et al [20] consider the gendered aspects of creating smoke-free homes for children through a scoping review on the nascent area of engaging fathers in such activity, and highlights the barriers and facilitators that fathers might face. Focusing on fathers and caregiving is a step toward more gender-transformative approaches to smoke-free home initiatives that have traditionally focused on mothers.…”

“…While the past twenty years has seen a rise in interest and application of sex and gender science in health, the substance use field has been slow to insist on the inclusion of these concepts. This special issue [5,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] is aimed at providing a remedy for this lack, and more importantly, to provide examples of the impact of sex and gender in a range of substances, cultures, populations and contexts.…”

“…These articles address concepts [5], different substances such as alcohol [12,19,23], cannabis [5,17,18], illegal drugs [13], nicotine [11,12], opioids [14], and multi drug use [10], populations such as gay and bisexual men [13], fathers [20], mothers [15], pregnant women [9,23], patients [9,17] and adolescents [14]. They address interactions with interpersonal violence [22], treatment responses [21], abortion policy [23], other harms [12] in a range of settings in countries including Spain, Scotland, Turkey, Canada, China, Taiwan, and the USA.…”