The researchers interviewed 446 adolescents aged 10-17 years and their parents about their smoking behavior, their attitudes toward smoking, and anti-smoking parenting practices (such as discussing reasons not to smoke or taking away privileges if the adolescent smoked). Levels of carbon monoxide in expired air samples helped to measure current smoking.
Adolescents with two parents who smoked were 3.8 times more likely to smoke cigarettes than were adolescents with two parents who had quit smoking, and 3 times more likely to smoke than were adolescents with a non-smoking mother and an ex-smoking father. However, there were no significant differences in smoking between adolescents who had two smoking parents and those who had an ex-smoking father and a smoking mother. Adolescents who viewed their parents as providing anti-smoking parenting were less likely to smoke as were adolescents, whose mothers had negative implicit attitudes toward smoking. The effect of parents' smoking on adolescents' smoking was, in part, accounted for by mothers' negative implicit attitudes and by children's views of the parenting that they received.
WHAT IT MEANS: Parents who quit smoking may reduce the likelihood that their adolescent will smoke, but this benefit is clearest in families in which the other parent is also a non-smoker. Non-smoking and ex-smoking parents may reduce adolescent smoking because they have negative implicit attitudes towards smoking and because they provide anti-smoking parenting. Families with two non-smoking parents and with parents who have negative implicit attitudes toward smoking may be most effective because they most clearly and consistently communicate anti-smoking messages to their adolescents.
Dr. Laurie Chassin and colleagues published the study in the September, 2002 issue of Pediatric Psychology.