Are You Setting A Good Example For Your Children By Smoking Cigarettes?
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012Have you been an effective parent? Will you set a good example and be aware that in relation to the learning habits for many younger kids, what they see is exactly what they do? We might care to feel that we set good examples and bring up our children correctly. Yet whilst we would make sure you teach them good manners and ways to behave in polite society, whenever they see us lighting up a cigarette as an element of an apparently habitual regime, what do you think they will do when they get older?
Many parents who are also smokers are secretly worried that their children should also turn out to be smokers themselves. They already know there is a certain amount of peer pressure involved in the social situations that they might come across as they mature and that this may be how they, themselves, were shown using cigarettes from their youth. They must be clearly aware that their kids are even more likely to pick up that first cigarette in a very social situation if this happened to be “okay” for many years at home. Why not stop smoking, immediately?
Setting an example is a must, however when looking at the act of smoking it could be a life or death situation. As being an adult you may be well aware of the potential health risks and also have seen, maybe first-hand through others, so what can happen should you be not successful with any attempts to stop smoking. You’re duty-bound to dissuade your young ones from trying out the habit of smoking, but this is of course destined to be very difficult to do if you’re still doing it yourself. It’s a question of saying one thing and doing another, which is hardly the way to set a good example, after all.
Quite apart from setting an example, children who are forced to grow up in a home where smoking is rampant are far more likely to develop illnesses themselves as a direct result of second-hand smoke inhalation.