Teens and Smoking. Things Parents Should Know About

Reasons Why Teen Smoke

There are a lot of factors that influence teens' decisions to start smoking. These factors range from personal reasons to the influence of parents and peers, to lifestyle. Listed below are the factors with a detailed explanation of each.

• Peer group influence:

This is one of the most crucial factors that influence the habit of smoking among teens. Peer groups lead nonsmoking friends into smoking and smoking friends into nonsmoking but the former is stronger. For teens to become smokers, they need someone who will initiate them into it, and friends are always the closest to them when parents are not around. A nonsmoking kid neither knows where cigarettes are sold nor knows how to light it up unless someone teaches him or her, and friends are always available to introduce them to it.

• Parents:

Maternal and paternal smoking has a great influence on the initiation of smoking in teens. The length of time in which parents smoke is very significant as this often affects whether their child will smoke or not. When kids are growing, they tend to pick up any act they see anyone in their surroundings do. Since research had proved that most smokers started when they were teenagers and teenagers spend more time with their parents than anyone else. Hence, smoking parents tend to influence their kids to smoke.

• Exploration:

Most kids are inquisitive. They want to know or even have a taste of everything going on around them. Smoking can serve as a means of exploration to kid especially at their teen's age. Some might try it once and after getting the feelings they stop while others continue and as a result get addicted to the process.

• Depression:

Since research has revealed that smoking often helps to reduce anxiety, depression, and stress, teens tend to use it as a means of improving their mood. But while they are trying to get out of depression, they often get addicted, and as a result, smoking becomes a habit for them.

• Tobacco Company Advertisement:

The company producing smokes now have used clever marketing tactics to specifically target teenagers. They also reduced the price of smokes just to make it affordable for teens.

Now you know the reason why teens smoke. But could there be a negative effect as to why smoking causes death? Yes, smoking has more does more harm than good to the body. Let’s take a look at the negative effect of smoking

Negative Effect Of Smoking On Teens

For every cigarette or tobacco teens smoke, there is always a detrimental effect on their health. Smoking affects the different parts of the body and some of them are listed below.

• Brain: When people smoke they tend to get exposed to the development of brain aneurysm, a disease that often leads to stroke. Smoking increases the chances of having a stroke which in the long run might cause death.
• Mood stimulation: Mood stimulation: Smoking often causes a change in mood. Teens' mood might change from good to bad and vice versa. But most times, it often changes it to the later which is the cause of anxiety.
• Cancer: Smoking is one of the main causes of cancer. When teens smoke, their body is prone to mutation which often leads to cancer. Since smoking deals with respiration, when teens smoke and inhale, the smoke goes into the lungs where it mutates some part of it and then causes cancer. Smoking also causes blood cancer.
• Constricted blood vessel: The nicotine present in smokes often causes blood vessels to tighten. When the blood vessel is tightened, blood flow within the body becomes restricted, and this may lead to an increase in blood pressure and heart attack.
• Heart disease: One of the proven lifestyle habits that affect the heart is smoking. Both people who smoke and those who are within the vicinity are at the risk of getting heart disease.
• Change in the immune system: Smoking often affects the immune system, thereby making it inactive to fight against infections. Teens who smoke are often infected with the respiratory disease than those who don't smoke.
• Cough: Coughing is often associated with damage to the airways in the respiratory system. One thing that usually causes this is smoking. So when teens smoke they are at the risk of a persistent cough.

How To Stop Teens From Smoking

The below three methods may be of help to stop your teens from smoking.

1. Try to be an example: As you can see from the reasons why teens smoke, parents play a major impact. Parents who smoke should quit if they don’t want their kids to be exposed to it. And if they can’t quit, they should find an alternative location where they can smoke and also keep away all smoking materials from their kids.
2. Enlightenment: Parents who smoke and those who don’t should enlighten teens (their kids with their peer group) on the negative effect of smoking. Trying to discourage them can help reduce and also stop teen smoking in society.
3. Spend more time with your kids: Spending time with your kids is very important as this would help you know what is going on with them. When teens don't see their parents or guardians around, they tend to do things that they are not supposed to do.

In today’s digital world, it is also necessary to keep an eye on teens’ online behavior. Lucky that we have many parental control app to help us with this. FamiSafe may be a great choice for you.

FamiSafe is a control app proven to be the best tool for parents to monitor their kids. The app is supported both on Android and iOS devices. FamiSafe has the following features:

• App Blocker:

If you found your kids are spending too much time on certain apps, you can use this feature to block the app easily.

• Youtube App control:

This can be used by parents to check videos watched by their kids and block some video channels.

• Explicit Content Detection:

This feature will detect sensitive words on different platforms like WhatsApp, Message and alert parents if certain words have been detected.

• Web Filter:

This feature allows parents to block kids from visiting webpages where they get access to inappropriate information.

To reduce the number of eenagers who are introduced to smokingevery year, parents must take the stand up to the task by using the FamiSafe control app and follow the suggested ways listed above.