Young children whose parents quit, are less likely to smoke

New research findings provide a compelling reason for smoking parents of young children to kick the habit. Results of a new study show that parents who quit smoking before their child reaches third grade will significantly reduce their child’s odds of becoming a smoker by the senior year of high school.

The study led by Jonathan Bricker and colleagues at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington revealed that if one parent quits by the time the child is 8 or 9, the child’s odds of being a daily or monthly smoker at age 17 or 18 decrease by 25 percent. If both parents quit, the child’s chances of smoking drop by nearly 40 percent. The findings are reported in the May issue of the journal Addiction, a publication of the United Kingdom-based Society for the Study of Addiction. ‘Statistics show that if a child reaches age 18 without becoming a smoker, his or her odds of remaining smoke-free are around 90 percent,’ said Bricker, a research associate in the Cancer Prevention and Trials Program of the Hutchinson Center. ‘Therefore, our results indicate that if all smoking parents were to quit by the time their children were around age 8, it could prevent 136,000 young people in the United States from becoming daily, long-term smokers.’ The most surprising finding of the study, Bricker said, was that parental influence on smoking was not affected by the child’s age when the last parent quit, as long as the parents quit by the time the child was 8 or 9. ‘It didn’t matter whether one or both parents quit when the child was a baby, a toddler or in third grade,’ Bricker said. ‘The most important thing was that they quit.’ More research is needed, however, to determine the benefits, if any, of parental-smoking cessation after children are 8 or 9. There also was no evidence that the gender of the parent or child had any influence on the children’s later smoking behavior; mothers were no more influential than fathers and girls were no more susceptible than boys. Not surprisingly, those least likely to smoke were the children of parents who had never taken up the habit. Smoking prevalence in 12th grade was 14 percent when neither parents had ever smoked as compared to 37 percent when both parents were current smokers and 26 percent when both parents had quit by the time the child was in third grade. The findings are based on data collected from more than 3,000 children and parents in 20 school districts in Washington. Information on parents’ smoking behavior was collected when the children were in the third grade (8 or 9 years old), and information on children’s smoking behavior was collected nine years later, when the children were in 12th grade (17 or 18 years old). Student self-reports of smoking activity were found to be largely accurate as verified through saliva tests that checked for the presence of cotinine, a by-product of nicotine. ‘This study is unique because it is the first prospective study to follow a large group of parents and children over time to examine the relationship between parental- smoking cessation when children are young and how it relates to smoking behavior in late adolescence,’ Bricker said. The students in the study served as the control, or comparison, group for the landmark Hutchinson Smoking Prevention Project, the largest and longest school-based intervention trial ever conducted in smoking-prevention research. Overall the study involved 8,400 students and 600 teachers throughout 40 school districts in Washington. Results of this 15-year study, funded by the National Cancer Institute, were published in 2000. (Source: cancerfacts.com: 12 May, 2003: Reuters Cancer News 20)