4 Troubled Teens Blog

A Harvard study has determined that adolescents whose parents smoke are more likely to begin smoking themselves. A team from the Harvard School of Public Health reached this conclusion after studying the habits of 559 boys and girls ages 12 to 17.

"The longer a parent smoked, the greater an adolescent's likelihood of starting smoking. Whether or not the parent was actually dependent on nicotine didn't affect the strength of the relationship."

Researchers also found that a father who smoked had a stronger effect on his son's risk that a mother's smoking had on her daughter. Source: ABS-CBN News5

Labels: parents, smokers, influences

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Children who are cigarette smokers in middle school are more likely to engage in troubled behaviors as teens, according to a new study from the Rand Corporation.

Researchers collected saliva samples from 2,000 middle school students to determine which children were smokers. By the time the early smokers were eighteen years old, 58 percent had engaged in two or more problem behaviors, including binge drinking, selling drugs, abusing drugs, and dropping out of school.

Those children who had not tried smoking in middle school were one and a half times more likely to have grade point averages of 3.0 (B) or above and to live in an intact family.

This study appears in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Labels: smoking, smokers, middle_school

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A Canadian study of teenaged smokers found that most were trying to quit, but could not. The average boy who starts smoking at 16 years will smoke for another sixteen years; the average girl, for another twenty.

Researchers at the University of Montreal kept track of 319 teenagers for five years. Seventy percent tried to quit, but only 19 percent managed to remain smoke-free for a year. At the beginning of the study, the teens were 12 to 13 years old, and only occasional smokers. By the end of the study, the majority were smoking on a daily basis.

This study appeared in the American Journal of Public Health.

Learn more: Help for Teens Quitting the Smoking Habit

Labels: teenagers, smoking, smokers

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