Smoking Hurts Your Kids

Secondhand smoke may seems harmless, just a minor matter of a bad smell and inconvenience to nonsmokers. How bad could it be? It’s not like secondhand smokers are taking in lungs full of poisoned air like you are, right? Well, unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that. According the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 2.5 million Americans have died from secondhand smoke in the last 50 years. Negative effects include heart disease, lung cancer, stroke.

Children feel the effects profoundly. In addition the the aforementioned conditioned, CDC says that kids suffer from ear infections, general respiratory problems, even sudden infant death syndrome, more often when in the presence of smokers. Long term exposure, of course, makes things much worse.

Kids Imitate Their Parents

Beyond the basic health effects of secondhand smoke on kids, children whose parents smoke are much more likely to develop their own bad habits eventually. According to a recent survey from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health, young girls whose mothers smoked were nearly four times more likely to develop their own nicotine addiction. When you smoke, your kids are watching. Your children look to you for guidance in the world. You provide the model. Keep that in mind the next time you light up.

If you don’t have kids but would like to have them some day, why not quit now? Having young children is a very stressful time, and it stays difficult for a long, long time. Quit now while you’ve got stress to spare. Get ahead of things. You’ll thank yourself one day. And so will your kids.

You Can Stop it

Quit smoking. Now. You can do it. You want to do it, the world wants you to do it. There are resources everywhere. And if you do, you’ll be in good company. People quit smoking all the time. While it’s true that people often only quit temporarily, tons of people manage to kick the nic permanently. And even a temporary break doesn’t hurt. Think of it as practice for the real thing. 25% of people who try to stop smoking can keep it up for 6 months if they have the aid of medicine. Even if you don’t cut it completely out that first time, you’ve trained yourself for the big one. No marathon runner simply got off the couch one day and accomplished their goal in one shot. It takes time and practice. You can earn your children’s respect. You can keep your kids safe. You can do this.   

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In present day America, smoking has become socially awkward, to say the least, and the percentage of smokers has been cut in half to 18%, per the article, although the U.S. tobacco industry is still worth half a trillion annually, as reported by the World Lung Foundation.

With diminishing sales in the U.S. and other higher-income countries, the tobacco industry has been aggressively expanding into poor nations. The LA Times reports that the consumption of cigarettes tripled in developing countries between 1970 and 2000, and that the World Health Organization is predicting one billion deaths caused by smoking this century, with 80% of those fatalities in developing countries.

As covered in an Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) fact sheet, large, multinational corporations based in the U.S. and the U.K. are primarily responsible for the spread of the smoking habit in developing countries because of the sophisticated and effective advertising and promotional methods they employ. Asian countries have been a major target.

According to ASH, the U.S. threatened trade sanctions against Japan, Thailand, South Korea, and Taiwan during the 1980s unless these countries opened their markets to American cigarettes. They succumbed, but Thailand was later able to ban cigarette advertising under a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) ruling.

ASH reports that in developing countries, the poorest people spend a large percentage of their income on cigarettes. According to ASH:

• In low income Egyptian households, tobacco accounts for more than 10% of household expenditures.
• 10.5 million malnourished people in Bangladesh could have adequate diets if they spent their money on food instead of tobacco.
• Many homeless people in India spend more on tobacco than food.
• Smokers spend 17% of their household income and 60% of their personal income on cigarettes in the Minhang district of China.

The LA Times article says that the U.S. should help developing countries build programs to tax and regulate tobacco products, and warn against the dangers of smoking. The article claims that aid at a modest cost to the U.S. could go a long way toward putting these programs in place and reducing tobacco use in developing countries.

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