Smoking
Young children who view smoking in movies are more likely to smoke later on.
As reported in the January 2008 issue of Pediatrics, young children who view smoking in movies are more likely to smoke later on. In "Longitudinal Study of Viewing Smoking in Movies and Initiation of Smoking by Children," researchers at Dartmouth Medical School surveyed children of ages 9 through 12 from 26 schools in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Only children who said they hadn't smoked before were included in the study. Based on randomly generated lists of 50 movies sampled from the most popular movies over the previous 5.5 years, children were asked what movies they'd seen. After this initial survey, children were interviewed again in two follow-up surveys one and two years later. During the follow-up surveys, children were asked what movies they'd seen, this time based on updated lists of the 50 most popular movies during the previous year. They were also asked whether they'd tried smoking. By the third survey, 9.6 percent of the children had initiated smoking. Results from the three surveys showed that each child had seen an average of 37 out of 150 popular movies they were asked about, exposing them to an average of 150 smoking occurrences. About 80 percent of the children's exposure was due to smoking images portrayed in youth-rated movies.
The results indicated that the earliest exposure to movie smoking was as important as exposure measured at the two follow-ups in predicting children's smoking initiation. This finding suggests that the process which leads children to initiate smoking begins much earlier than adolescence. Overall, movie smoking may contribute to future tobacco use in at least one-third of elementary school-age children.
The take home message from this study is that parents should try to reduce their children's viewing of movies that contain smoking. Even young children who see smoking in movies may be at risk for smoking later on. Parents also need to know that most of children's exposure to movie smoking comes from youth-rated (G, PG, PG-13) movies.
