A new study found that children born in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s were much less likely to have smoked cigarettes at an early age than children born 30 years earlier—and the drop may be explained in part by changes in the socioeconomic circumstances and behaviors of their mothers and friends.
Among a group of kids born in 1970, 14.5% smoked a cigarette by age 10 or 11, researchers found. But in a group of kids born from 2000-2002, only 2.4% started smoking early.
In the older group, 57% had mothers with no higher education and 43% had mothers who smoked; in the younger generation, those numbers had fallen to 8% and 33%. In addition, while 14% of the older group had a friend at age 10-11 who smoked, just 5% of the younger group did.
“I think the results of this study are really important because they reinforce the research that has been emerging to help us understand disparities in smoking in low-income communities,” Vaughan Rees, director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, said in a July 11, 2018 Reuters article. Rees noted that while the overall smoking rate for U.S. adults is around 15%, the rate among low-income adults is 27%, suggesting the need for creative new approaches to prevention in the latter population.
Read Reuters article: Peers and parents may have influenced drop in childhood smoking
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