Study: Smoking Parents Bad For Kids

The Leader-Post reports:

Parents who smoke not only risk making themselves sick, they could be making their children depressed, anxious or aggressive.

Cincinnati scientists who studied 225 children, ages five to 11, found those with the highest levels of exposure to tobacco smoke had more behaviour problems, such as fidgeting, acting out and not paying attention in school.

There was a clear dose-response effect: The bigger the exposure, the bigger the problems. However, children breathing in even low levels of cigarette smoke had behaviour issues.

"With tobacco, we're not really seeing a threshold where there's no effect," said Kimberly Yolton, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Medical Center, who presented her data Sunday at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in San Francisco.

"We're seeing effects on these outcomes at levels that are very low."

All the children had asthma, but Yolton suspects the results would apply to any child living in a smoky home.

How long before there is an attempt to ban tobacco in apartment buildings or condos?