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Home smoking bans prevent teens from lighting up

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Parents who enforce no-smoking rules at home are less likely to have teens who experiment with cigarettes, a new study finds.

"This basic intervention implementing a household smoking ban has the potential to promote antismoking norms and to prevent adolescent smoking," said lead study author Alison Albers, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health.

Albers and colleagues interviewed 2,217 Massachusetts adolescents ages 12 to 17, and followed them for four years. They discovered that teens living in households that did not ban smoking were more likely to report smoking as socially acceptable, compared to teens whose parents banned smoking.

Teens whose parents allowed smoking at home also tended to believe that a higher percentage of adults in their town smoked, compared to teens with household bans.

Forbidding smoking at home was also related to reduced incidence of smoking experimentation, although this only occurred in youth who lived with non-smokers, the authors report in the October issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Youths who lived with non-smokers but did not have a household smoking ban were nearly twice as likely to begin experimenting with cigarettes, compared to teens whose parents banned smoking.

"Adolescents are faced with so many influences that contribute to smoking attitudes and behaviours … to find that a simple household rule that bans smoking in the home has a meaningful impact on smoking attitudes and behaviours is somewhat surprising," Albers said.


"This study provides evidence that even in a smoke-free home environment, parental behaviour remains a strong influence on teen smoking attitudes and behaviour," said Mary Hrywna. She is manager of the Center for Tobacco Surveillance & Evaluation Research at the University of Medicine and Dentistry and New Jersey School of Public Health in New Brunswick.

"These bans send a strong message to teens that it’s not okay to smoke, and in the face of so many other external factors that may influence teens to smoke peers, advertising a home smoking policy is one thing that parents can control to some extent," Hrywna said.

(Source: American Journal of Public Health: Boston University School of Public Health: August 2008)


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Dates

Posted On: 23 August, 2008
Modified On: 16 January, 2014

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