Do any of you have kids who smoke?

Parent Cafe
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<p>Counting Down:</p>

<p>Statistically, nearly all nicotine addicts started as teens or earlier. There are exceptions that prove the rule, but statistically, virtually nobody starts using nicotine after their teen years in this day and age. I mean nobody would decide to become a smoker now, with the way smokers are treated like lepers by society. It was different back when smoking was socially acceptable.</p>

<p>The tobacco companies know this. That’s why they market so heavily to kids and successfully lobby against any restrictions that would undercut their ability sell to kids (like removing the sale of cigarettes at convenience stores on every street corner in America).</p>

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<p>I think that what needs to be done, in general, is that someone needs to crack down on these movie producers that feel the constant need to include and glorify smoking in the movies. I cannot think of one adult movie that I’ve watched in the past few years that did not include smoking. They are so predictable too-- the light up either:</p>

<p>a) at a bar;
b) after sex:
c) while talking about a stressful subject;</p>

<p>They make it seem so normal and expected. I hate it and I lose respect for the actors/actresses who go along with it.</p>

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<p>I agree. But at least characters on TV shows don’t generally smoke anymore. Not at all like the old days, when Lucy and Ricky and seemingly every other character on every show always had cigarettes lit. And there were cigarette commercials. I still remember when they went off the air on (I think) December 31, 1969.</p>

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<p>And yet Mad Men is so popular, critically acclaimed and winning many awards. Will it make smoking more appealing again?</p>

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<p>Garland, totally agree with you. I think the issue here is that her husband has a serious chronic illness that includes up days and down days. There are many days when he can barely manage to go to work, so I think she feels responsible for preparing most meals. If he’s having a down day, it’s possible he doesn’t have the energy reserve to fend for himself when he gets home. I think in almost every other situation, tough love would be the answer, but there are other issues at bay here. I also suspect it would behoove his overall health if he ate better (more whole grains, etc.), but he refuses to eat the whole grains, etc. He gave up drinking quite a few years ago and I suspect he doesn’t want to be told he can’t have certain foods, too.</p>

<p>Caught between a rock and a hard place.</p>

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<p>I don’t think Mad Men will make smoking appealing again any more than watching the characters drink themselves into liver failure looks appealing.</p>

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<p>I am a teen myself and one of my best friends is a smoker. He’s sort of on-and-off but he always comes back to it. He grew up in a household where his mom smokes all the time and her relatives likewise were smokers (no lung cancer/emphysema in the family history either). He holds the opinion that he is unlikely to acquire anything life-threatening based on his family but, should he acquire something like lung cancer, he says so be it. His prevailing attitude is that he doesn’t care for true longevity; if he gets claimed by something in his 50s or 60s then it’s alright with him. I wouldn’t consider him depressed or disordered in any way either; that’s simply his perspective. Who knows, maybe your son is encountering a bit of that “why live when you’re 90 anyways” attitude in college. And yes, you might say my friend is just trying to rationalize but having known him for several years, before he started smoking, he was almost always this way.</p>

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<p>You friend is assuming that he makes it to 50. Bryan Lee Curtis made it to 34:</p>

<p>[Smoking</a> Kills - Bryan Story - “He wanted you to know”](<a href=“http://www.whyquit.com/whyquit/BryanLeeCurtis.html]Smoking”>http://www.whyquit.com/whyquit/BryanLeeCurtis.html)</p>

<p>But, honestly, the smokers pay the biggest price while they are still “healthy”. Your friend willl probably have to stop exercising in his 30s, when his aerobic capacity reaches a point where he simply gets winded too easy. Meanwhile. at least half the people he meets in his life will think of him as some kind of “loser” because he smokes. But, I’m sure he thinks he enjoys smoking.</p>

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<p>just postin to get into my profile im confused</p>

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<p>

It’s awfully perplexing, I know, but what most people want to seriously quit won’t make him budge. Smoking is so ingrained in his family and culture (he’s Hispanic and often travels to his relative’s countries where, he tells me, smoking is far and away the norm) that he’s just indifferent to the health side of it, period.

Unfortunately this is probably an incentive for him to keep smoking.</p>

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<p>That’s what they all say. Just more junkie excuses. Junkie rationalizations.</p>

<p>The kid is addicted to a drug. His brain chemistry needs the drug to function. It’s been hijacked by nicotine. He knows it’s insane to smoke, but his brain needs the drug he is addicted to. So, he comes up with the same tired old list of junkie rationalizations that smokers use all day, every day, for their entire lives, until it kills them to justify their smoking to themselves. </p>

<p>You can’t understand a smoker until you understand that a smoker is a junkie. No different than a crack addict or a heroin addict. Would you give a moment’s thought to a junkie’s explanation of why he “needs” heroin? No, because it’s all BS.</p>

<p>In fairness to your friend: If his mother was a nicotine addict, he was probably born a nicotine addict, with a nicotine addict’s altered brain chemistry, and he will be a nicotine addict for the rest of his life. He has two options. Stop the use of nicotine completely and permanently. Or, use nicotine all day, every day, for his entire life, unable to quit, until it kills him. Every time he lights a cigarette, he is lighting the 7500 more cigarettes he will smoke this year (if he’s a one pack a day addict).</p>

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<p>Heroin and cocaine begin to impair brain function rather quickly… a cig or two once every so often may or may not cause cancer years after.</p>

<p>I would suggest switching to cannabis. Much safer and funner.</p>

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<p>Actually, nicotine works on the same group of brain receptors in very much the same way as cocaine and heroin. It is the alteration of those brain receptors and the brain chemistry that is the underlying cause of the addiction.</p>

<p>The up-regulation of the brain receptors that is the defining brain chemistry indicator of nicotine addiction starts to occur very quickly for many people when they start smoking. Some teens show signs of clinical addiction after just a few cigarettes. A theory is that they were born nicotine addicts (mothers smoking during pregnancy) and the first cigarettes simply reactivate the dormant addiction.</p>

<p>They’ve done recent studies using computer imaging of the brain to actually watch the nicotine bind to brain receptors. In a group of ex-smokers, one cigarette hi-jacked 89% of the brain receptors for over three hours, essentially re-igniting the brain chemistry addiction.</p>

<p>BTW, cancer is the least of a smoker’s heath worries. Nicotine and carbon monoxide kill the circulatory system. Most smokers die of heart attack or stroke. Emphysema and COPD kill a lot, too. Cancer is probably the third most common; it just gets the most headlines.</p>

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<p>I’ve read every post on this thread. To the OP, I am in a similar situation. My daughter, 17, left 4 weeks ago to begin her freshman year in Europe where she will be doing her degree. I recently found out that she has taken up smoking. No one in our family smokes. I too thought that with her away perhaps it might be best to wait until she comes home at Christmas to address this with her…but after reading interested dad’s posts I realised, by then, it may be too late. If I found out she was taking heroin I wouldn’t wait until Christmas before I intervened, so why would I wait just because cigarettes are legal and herioin isn’t. Neither have any benefits whatsoever, both are heavily addicting, so why differentiate simply because one is legalised suicide and the other isn’t. </p>

<p>Instead I sent an email to my daughter telling her that i loved her but that i could no more sit by and watch her kill herself by smoking than I could walk by her if she was lying on the ground in a pool of blood. What she is doing is wrong and I’m going to do everything in my power to get her to change her mind about this. And if she’s mad at me so be it, at least if it works she can live a long healthy life being mad at me.</p>

<p>At the end of the day, I just couldn’t live with myself if 20 years down the road she’s lying in some hospital bed dying of some smoking related illness and have regrets because I didn’t do all I could to prevent that situation.</p>

<p>I refuse to be some Dina Lohan type of mother that sits by and watches her kid do real damage to themselves. This is not about letting my daughter make her own choices and live with them, trust me in the 4 weeks she’s been away she’s made some interesting choices to say the least. But hey their her choices and she needs to see how they pan out for her, but smoking, no smoking is a different matter entirely.</p>

<p>As the email was sent a little while ago, I don’t yet have her response but i’ll make sure to keep this thread alive until both my daughter and your son kick this filthy, dirty, killing habit.</p>

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<p>caymandriver- with your D in Europe it will be more difficult. When we were in Zurich this summer my kids and nieces all noticed how most people smoke. It was in such a contrast to the US. My BIL smokes and my older niece said when she goes out with her Dad it is sometimes embarrassing because he is the only one smoking.</p>

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<p>mom60- yes she probably is encountering more people that smoke than what she did in her high school but slowly change is coming there too. Sadly she is in a country with very high smoking rates and little in the way of smoking bans. But she’s worth the effort to keep on trying to get her to see what a mistake this is.</p>

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<p>At least heroin gives you a great buzz (so they say). The crazy thing about nicotine is that it doesn’t even do that. It has absolutely nothing that could be construed as reason to use it. It’s an insecticide poison.</p>

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<p>I sure don’t have the answer for teen smoking. It’s a challenge. The health issues are abstract to teens. It’s not like they can actually feel the toll on the fitness yet. I think it’s very important to explain that they are walking into a trap that may not be so easy for them to escape. I think it’s also quite reasonable to explain the social stigma. You feel like such a loser when you are the only person getting up from a nice meal to sneak outside, like a junkie, to get the nicotine fix. Nobody enjoys smoking all day, every day, for their entire lives.</p>

<p>The real shame is that, up to the point where you are caught in the trap and addicted, it’s so easy to not smoke. I don’t have a daily struggle keep from injecting heroin because I have absolutely zero desire to do so. Someone who has never been addicted to nicotine has no desire to smoke. But, once that trap is set, it’s a whole different ballgame. There’s not a single smoker in the entire world who wants their children to be smokers.</p>

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<p>caymandriver, I empathize.</p>

<p>My son called me (using Skype to call my phone, which makes it very inexpensive) from Budapest yesterday afternoon my time, to tell me about his day (as he’s been doing every other day or so while he’s there; he’s going back to Vienna tomorrow and his regular classes begin on Monday). </p>

<p>At some point during our hour-long conversation – and maybe I’ll write somewhere else about that, and what’s going on with my sister, my only sibling, who lives alone in a village outside Budapest and whom he just saw for the first time since he was 5 (I haven’t seen her since then at all) – I brought up the smoking again. I knew that he had stopped entirely for a week or so recently because he wasn’t feeling well; some kind of indeterminate cold/allergy/virus thing. (To digress, he actually ended up going to a doctor; the program coordinator took him, which was reassuring to hear. When he told me that he’d thrown up, and hadn’t eaten anything for 24 hours other than grapes and grapefruit juice – which was all he had around; a combination that might make me throw up! – I was ready to get on the next plane to rescue him, but, fortunately, he made and was able to eat some pasta while I stayed on the phone with him, and he went to the doctor the next day and started feeling better rather quickly.) </p>

<p>In any event, I sort of hoped that maybe he hadn’t started up smoking again at all after he was better; I mentioned to him more than once that during the years I smoked, I suffered from colds far more than I ever did before or since. Unfortunately, he has started again, although, as before, he says it isn’t a lot. I have no illusions that there’s anything much I can do about it from here, but I did say we really need to seriously talk about this when he gets home in early December, and that I’m still very upset about it. He then said, well, he’s actually thinking about stopping. And I said, well, that’s good to hear. And he explained that the reason is that because he doesn’t smoke that much, and there are long periods of many hours when he doesn’t at all, he’s still able to notice the difference it makes in his ability to smell things (something I hadn’t even thought of). And that he doesn’t enjoy losing his sense of smell. Of course, I was encouraging. And, equally of course, he concluded by emphasizing that that would be the ONLY reason he stopped, and if he did stop, it would have absolutely NOTHING to do with anything I said to him about it. He just wanted to make sure I knew that.</p>

<p>Well, OK, whatever works for him. So I am feeling a little bit more hopeful, because he brought that up himself.</p>

<p>By the way, I have tried bringing up with him the business about tobacco making you and your clothes smell bad and nobody would want to come near you. His response has been, sorry, that won’t work with him, because almost everyone around his age he knows who’s gay is a smoker. Which I’m afraid doesn’t surprise me too much. Just like it didn’t surprise me to hear how much more people in Europe seem to smoke.</p>

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<p>That kind of sums up a lot of about parenting young adults.</p>

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<p>DonnaL et al:</p>

<p>So an update over the past week or so regarding my daughter and smoking. I think in her mind she wasn’t really a “smoker” as she only smoked when she was out or with friends (so I’m guessing less than 10/week). In my email with her I pointed out that no one starts smoking with the intention of being addicted and that there are plenty of people just like her that smoked a few cigarettes while out at a party or when stressed etc and they wake up one day addicted. There is also no way of know which smoke will be “the one” that hooks you. I also pointed out that is never gets easier to try to quit tomorrow so why light up today. </p>

<p>We also made it quite clear to her that as parents we could not ethically support this and since we had no way of knowing if she was smoking, we’d have no way of knowing if our money was going to purchase cigarettes or not so if she decided to smoke her monthly allowance would be terminated. She has enough savings that she wouldn’t starve but we were fully prepared to play that card through if need be. </p>

<p>I agree the whole “whose going to want to go out with you when you smell like smoke” argument doesn’t hold any sway, particularly when the kids are in an environment that doesn’t exactly look down upon smoking. There is still no smoking bans of any substance in Germany. There is a smoker lounge in my daughter’s dorm and routinely kids get together to smoke shisha, so I’ve decided that the best way is to try and have her choose not to smoke. We’ve been fairly loose about letting her make most of her own decisions whilst at college and not really prying into her business but on this we drew the line and she knows it. So far she seems to have decided it is more hassle than it is worth to smoke. We certainly have no way of knowing if she has indeed quit, but I have one final ace up my sleeve. </p>

<p>She’ll be home for Christmas and I intend on booking her in for a full blood work and physical checkup. If she is smoking is will turn up in her screening. As drug screening for insurance and new jobs is more prevalent this will be a little life lesson on how freedom to make her own choices doesn’t necessarily mean an absence of responsibility for those choices. At that point we’ll see if she’s lived up to her word or not. If not then the doctor can present the real physical damage she’s already done to her body, we will cut off her allowance, and kick her off our insurance. She will still have insurance in Germany, but she will need to pay for her own fun, and have to buy travel insurance when she comes back to the US for visits. She’ll also have to face the fact that she will need to make her own doctor and dentist appointments at school and figure out how to navigate a health care system in a language she doesn’t speak. But since we made it clear from the start she’ll need to face those consequences. She may still decide to smoke but is won’t be on our dime and we will know that we did everything we as parents could do to stop it.</p>

<p>So, in the mean time I plan on giving her little reminders every few weeks of the dangers of smoking and then see what the outcome is in December.</p>