The illusion of smoking can be just as deadly as the real thing for minority inner-city girls who believe their mothers have the habit, a new
University of Florida study finds.
Black and Hispanic inner-city girls who think their mothers smoke -- even if that is not the case -- were three times more likely to have tried cigarettes than girls who know their mothers are nonsmokers, said Julia Graber, a UF psychology professor who did the research with seventh-grade girls. The study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Research on Adolescence.
“What really matters is what daughters think is happening, not so much what mothers actually do,” Graber said. “That makes it very important for mothers who aren’t smokers, but whose daughters think they are for some reason, to give clear messages they don’t smoke and don’t consider it to be appropriate behavior. Adolescence is a critical time for learning about addiction, because smokers are more likely to start then than at any other stage in their lives.”
Worse, girls who had never tried cigarettes yet mistakenly believed their mothers smoked were twice as likely to try cigarettes than girls who knew their moms were nonsmokers, she said.
Why girls would think their mothers smoked when they said they didn’t is unclear, Graber said.
“It may be that smoking in minority households occurs less frequently and more sporadically, thereby causing greater confusion among adolescent girls about their mothers’ smoking status,” she said. Also, other adults in the household may smoke and the girls may mistakenly believe that this is common adult behavior, Graber said. Or perhaps their mothers actually do smoke even though they said they don’t and their daughters have seen them, she said.
Although smoking rates among teens and adults have remained fairly stable, smoking is no longer more prevalent among men and boys, Graber said.
Concerns about the health effects of smoking in women have increased. As reported in the paper, lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death in women, and studies have found smoking to be a factor in cervical cancer and pre-term births.
Minority women may face even greater risks of developing smoking-related disease, Graber said, noting that blacks have higher rates of high blood pressure, diabetes and delivery of low birth-weight babies, conditions all made worse by smoking.
Although studies have been done among white suburban youth on the social factors influencing adolescents to smoke, little research has been done on minorities, Graber said. Her research focused on 293 black and 96 Hispanic girls between 11 and 15 who attended school in New York City, and their mothers. The 23 public and seven parochial schools represented in the study were selected from districts with low socioeconomic status based on the New York City Board of Education’s poverty index and which had at least 80 percent minority student enrollment. The girls and their mothers reported their race and ethnicity based on a list and had to select one option.
Seventh grade blacks and Hispanic girls in English-speaking, mainstream classes were recruited for the study, and those who returned parental consent forms participated. The study consisted of a written survey for students and a 15-minute telephone interview with their mothers asking whether or not they smoked, how prevalent they believed smoking was among adults and their attitudes about children smoking. The daughters were asked if their mothers smoked, if they themselves intended to smoke within the next year and how often they smoked cigarettes, with response categories ranging from “never tried it” to “more than once a day.”