�Parents world Health Organization enforce no-smoking rules at home are less probable to have teens wHO experiment with cigarettes, a new survey finds.
"This basic intervention implementing a family smoking ban has the potential to promote antismoking norms and to forbid adolescent smoke," said lead study author Alison Albers, Ph.D., an assistant prof at Boston University School of Public Health.
Albers and colleagues interviewed 2,217 Massachusetts adolescents ages 12 to 17, and followed them for four long time. They ascertained that teens living in households that did not ban smoke 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 conceive that a higher percent of adults in their town smoke-dried, 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 nonsmokers, the authors report in the October issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
Youths who lived with nonsmokers but did not have a home smoking forbiddance were about twice as likely to begin experimenting with cigarettes, compared to teens whose parents banned smoking.
"Adolescents ar faced with so many influences that contribute to smoking attitudes and behaviors . . . to feel that a simple menage rule that bans smoking in the home has a meaningful impact on smoking attitudes and behaviors is slightly surprising," Albers said.
"This work provides evidence that even in a smoke-free home environment, maternal behavior remains a strong influence on teen smoking attitudes and behavior," 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 okeh to roll of tobacco, and in the face of so many early external factors that may influence teens to smoking peers, advert a habitation smoking policy is one thing that parents pot control to some extent," Hrywna said.
The Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute and the National Cancer Institute funded the study.
The American Journal of Public Health is the monthly daybook of the American Public Health Association. Visit hypertext transfer protocol://www.apha.org for more information.
Albers AB, et al. Household smoking bans and adolescent antismoking attitudes and smoking initiation: Findings from a longitudinal study of a Massachusetts early days cohort. Am J Public Health 98(10), 2008.
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