10 Tips for Talking to Your Children About Smoking

1. Let your child know how you feel about tobacco use. Give clear, specific messages when talking about tobacco use so your child will know exactly what is expected.
2. Children listen. When it comes to making decisions about risky behaviors, children value the clear messages and the accurate information you give them.
3. Don't assume that your child will learn to be smoke-free at school. Help educate your child by emphasizing the immediate and long-term health effects of cigarettes. Destroy the myth that everybody smokes and help them to recognize cigarette ads that are targeted towards youth.
4. Be aware of who your child hangs out with. If they have at least one close friend who smokes, the chances that they will pick up a cigarette are much greater.
5. Encourage your child to walk away from friends who don’t recognize or respect their reasons for not smoking.
6. If you smoke, share your struggles to quit with your child. Children greatly underestimate how difficult it is to quit smoking. Showing how hard it is to quit can help eliminate this misperception. Continuing to try to quit, despite the difficulties, also sends a strong anti-tobacco message to your children.
7. Have extended family support to keep kids tobacco-free. Instruct all smoking relatives to not provide tobacco to your child. Also, maintain a smoke-free home. Not allowing anyone to smoke in your home creates a powerful statement that you believe smoking is undesirable.
8. Don't believe that tobacco use is less dangerous than other risky behaviors. In addition to well known long term effects, using tobacco has immediate social and health consequences.
9. Help clean up tobacco in your child’s environment. Insist on tobacco-free school zones, and protest if neighborhood stores sell tobacco to children.
10. It is never too early or too late to intervene. Children often take their first puffs at ages 7-9, and even those who have been smoking for several years can be helped to quit.

Source:  American Lung Association of Oregon