What Do You Tell Your Teenager That Wants to Smoke Cigarettes Like You?

What Do You Tell Your Teenager That Wants to Smoke Cigarettes Like You?

What do you tell your teenager that wants to smoke cigarettes like you? This is a tough question to answer.

If you're a cigarette smoker, like I was, and you have children, as I do, there's going to come to a point when you will likely face this question.

If your kids grew up with you smoking, or your spouse or partner smoking, at some point most kids want to emulate their parents. They see their parents as role models. A parent is in many ways a hero to their child, someone that doesn’t do things that are wrong.

If they see you smoke, it tells them it’s ok for them to smoke.

A parent is someone they can look up to. Someone they can trust.

A child learns that if they copy a major league baseball player, for example, or a professional football player, the chance of them seeing the same success increases. See greatness. Copy greatness. Achieve greatness.

A child’s parent is the superhero to most children growing up, so if a five-year-old child sees a parent constantly picking up a cigarette and smoking, they will grow up and think that it's probably the best way that their mom or dad has chosen to live.

If mom or dad smokes, why wouldn’t that be a good choice for me?

This question is possibly one of the most difficult questions a parent might have to answer. I want first again to say that this is me speaking as a parent and through experience only. I'm not a health professional. I'm not licensed. I'm not credentialed.

If there's any question or concern about what you should do, then consult a qualified professional to answer your questions.

This is simply advice like we were sitting at a bar, sitting at a card game, or as though we were sitting and having coffee in a restaurant. I’m telling you what worked for me, and what I would believe would work for most people. It’s my opinion.

We have four children and thankfully, it was really only one of them that ever really had this concern about cigarette smoking, and the other three just completely stayed away.

What I found really is that the old adage “honesty is the best policy” is really the very best thing that you can do with your child. Especially if they want to smoke cigarettes.

Let me stop here and back up a little. It may be helpful to tell you about what happened to me when I was younger, and my parents discovered I smoked cigarettes.

It was actually my second day of 11th grade in high school, and I walked around to the front side of the building and I lit a cigarette, just as the assistant principal saw me.

He promptly brought me right inside and called my parents. He told them what had happened.

To show you the change in times, I got in trouble at that point because I wasn't smoking in the designated student smoking area!

The high school students had a designated area to smoke, which was the area directly behind the cafeteria that was neatly walled on at least three sides. The walls would make it very unobvious if your parents or anybody else drove by the outer part of the high school.

It would be very unlikely for anyone to see all these students puffing away there, but if you were going to smoke, and you were a student, that was the place you were supposed to smoke!

I smoked in a different spot, and that's why I got in trouble.

Obviously, things are very different these days!

With that said, my parents said to me (they were both cigarette smokers} that they didn't want me to smoke behind their backs. If I was going to smoke cigarettes, they wanted me to be upfront and honest, and smoke in front of them.

That was good advice. What I ended up doing is smoking in front of them. And everywhere else.

At that point, I was 16 years old and continued to smoke up to around age 50, so it didn't end up causing me to not smoke.

Going back to that original question, though I think being honest with your children, and showing them and telling these things to them, and how it made you feel, is a good thing.

One of our daughters did try smoking, but by sharing how I increasingly became dependent on cigarettes and explaining what nicotine does, how if I got a cold it was many times worse than when I didn’t smoke, and how nicotine controlled what I did and where I went - she stopped very quickly.

In addition to that, if you were speaking to your teenager about who wants to smoke, mention how much better a non-smoker can taste their food. Do you need to add more garlic, onion, or something else to make the flavor stronger because you are a smoker? Tell your teen that.

Tell your teen how it feels to stand outside where you work, on a cold, rainy day, or maybe in the snow, 100 feet from the building, so everyone can look out from inside and see you smoking there.

Tell your teen how you feel when you are planning a trip and have to not smoke in the airport and on the plane, and how you really need a cigarette but can’t have it.

Tell them how it feels to wake up and need a cigarette. Or how you feel the minute you finish eating and need a cigarette. Or how before, during, and after almost anything you do, or anywhere you go, you need a cigarette.

Talk about how you spend all your time planning where and when your next cigarette will be, and how you have to constantly make sure you have enough cigarettes, lighters, and matches?

Talk about the guilt you feel, every time you look at your child, and they see you smoking, knowing how that makes them feel.

Tell them all those things, or none of those things, but make sure they never start to smoke cigarettes.

Tell them you care. Tell them you love them.

Just try to be upfront and honest with them. Explain that the advantages they may think of smoking (which are really none) are far outweighed by all the disadvantages.

Then add the tremendous cost of smoking and the fact that cigarette smokers are treated like outcasts these days. Why start smoking?

When I was younger, it was very socially acceptable wherever a person went, to smoke cigarettes. People sat down and they had a beer, or they had a cup of coffee, and they smoked a cigarette. It was just normal.

If you ate a meal with friends and you lit up cigarettes at the end of the meal, it was normal. It was almost expected. Thankfully it's not like that anymore.

The point is that I tried to tell my kids that we know better now, we know it's not a good thing to smoke. We know the dangers of smoking. We know the cost of smoking. We know all the ways that smoking impacts your life in a negative way.

Thankfully, none of our children, nor my wife, smoke cigarettes.

In a perfect world, nobody would smoke cigarettes. But if you have a teenager, and they see you as their role model, take this seriously.

If they want to smoke cigarettes, whether you find out because you see a pack in their pocketbook, or in their closet, or somebody comes and says they saw Johnny smoking a cigarette, or if they actually just come to you and say Mom and Dad - I want to smoke cigarettes.

Your best bet is to sit them down and tell them how you feel, or felt about smoking. Even if you're a current smoker tell them if you'd like to quit.

Maybe they could help you quit. Perhaps that might be enough to keep them away from smoking. But do anything you can (within reason) to stop them from becoming cigarette smokers.

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