Good parenting deters smoking

Cigarette advertising can influence teenagers to smoke despite the best efforts of parents, researchers say.

But good parenting - defined as setting limits for children and taking an active interest in their daily lives - halves the risk that a teen will start smoking, the researchers found.

"Even if you do a good job of parenting, this advertising can undermine your effectiveness," said John Pierce, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study.

"People come to me and say, 'I try to do everything right and still my kid starts smoking'," said Dr Pierce, whose study is published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"The protective effect of recommended parenting seems to come from parents being more vigilant and interactive to keep kids from mixing with peers who smoke. But they don't appear to be aware of the powerful influence of the media messages."

For their research, Dr Pierce and colleagues interviewed more than 1600 California children.

"We took a representative sample of 12- to 14-year-olds who had never smoked in 1996, and re-interviewed them in 1999, by which time 30 per cent had smoked," he said.

The study looked at parenting measures, peer smoking and the effect of tobacco advertising and promotions.

"The first thing we found is that recommended [authoritative] parenting is protective. Those kids who had recommended parenting practices were half as likely to smoke as others."

A fifth of the teens whose parents were involved and authoritative, but not authoritarian, had tried cigarettes by 1999. The figure for those whose parents were less involved was twice as high.

Recommended or authoritative parenting is not a new concept, Pierce said.

"It means you should always be there for them. But you set limits on their behaviour, especially free time, and you monitor what they do - how many nights they are allowed out a week after school and so on. You incrementally give them more independence as they start showing responsibility."

To determine the effect of cigarette advertising, the researchers simply asked the children.

"For example, we asked them do they have a favourite cigarette ad and would they wear an image - would they carry a bag [advertising a certain brand]?" he said.

Among teenagers whose parents were more authoritative, 40 per cent of the youngsters said advertising accounted for their decisions to smoke.

Susceptibility to advertising did not seem to predict who would smoke in the non-authoritative parenting group - those whose parents did not set limits, or whose parents set limits but did not show much day-to-day interest in what their children did.

Dr Pierce said he had no evidence to prove that tobacco companies are deliberately seeking to undermine the authority of parents. Tobacco companies have said repeatedly that they do not target teens or children with their ads, but rather seek to influence adults who already smoke.

- REUTERS

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