All you media-shunning-in-parenting types are going to have the last laugh here, at least assuming you're also interested in having your kid stay away from cigarettes as well. Because what's a highly-effective way to get your kid to start smoking?
Let them watch lots of movies.
Oh, and lest you are feeling virtuous about not letting your kids see R-rated or PG-13 movies, thinking they're the ones responsible for this, well, you'd be wrong. In fact, movies seen in early childhood, which usually are G-rated anyway, are shown to have as much impact on kid's later smoking behavior as movies seen when they're older.
Gah.
2,200 boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 12 were studied who were enrolled in
grades four through six in New Hampshire and
Vermont, and they were subjected to a series of interviews based on their viewing habits of a bunch of mainstream films. The films were coded as to the number of smokig occurrences" each contained, and it was found that 21 percent of the smoking occurrences were found in "R" movies,
slightly more than 60 percent were found in "PG-13" movies, and almost
19 percent were found in "G" or "PG" films.
By the third interview, almost 10 percent of the kids had started to
smoke, and on average had viewed almost 37 films, which meant they had viewed an average of almost 150 smoking occurrences. The researchers concluded that 35 percent of the smoking that occurred among
the children was a direct result of watching smoking scenes on the
screen. In addition, kids who had watched smoking scenes while in preschool were just as likely to smoke as kids who watched on-screen smoking at a later age.
I know I considered smoking a normal casual thing when growing up, having watched "I Love Lucy" reruns, Winnie-the-Pooh on psychadelics, and a hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland", not to mention several dozen trick-cigar-smoking cartoon characters. Though since my parents didn't smoke (and were rather vehement ex-smokers) and I knew no adults who did, it never entered my mind that smoking was okay despite having seen almost everyone on old TV and films doing it.
So I'm not sure I buy this research, actually.
Photo: smokersclubinc.com
