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Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
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Fewer Children Smoke When Parents Make R-Rated Movies Off Limits [07/06-3]
Excerpts from: Hazards: See a Movie, Then Light Up?
By JOHN O'NEIL New York Times [07/06/04]
Keeping children who are entering the teenage years from seeing R-rated movies
may help prevent them from smoking, a new study suggests.
The study followed more than 2,500 students from 10 to 14 over two years. The students whose parents let them see R-rated movies sometimes or all the time were almost five times as likely to have tried smoking during the study period as those who never saw the movies, according to the study, being published today in the journal Pediatrics.
The lead author, Dr. James D. Sargent of Dartmouth Medical School, said the study took into account differences in overall parental strictness, which did not appear to have a significant effect on experimenting with smoking. But the study could not demonstrate a cause-and-effect link between smoking and movie viewing because it was based on statistical correlations.
Dr. Sargent's group decided to examine the effect of R-rated movies because smoking is far more common in those films than in movies rated G or PG. He said earlier research had shown that in the teenage years, when most smoking begins, observation and imitation play a crucial role.
In fact, the researchers estimated that the adolescents who reported that they saw R-rated movies all the time saw 1,500 scenes of movie smoking on average, compared with 500 or fewer for those who were not allowed to see R-rated films. And the effect of the movies appeared to be greatest for children whose parents did not smoke.
Dr. Sargent said the gap suggested that the on-screen example had a bigger effect in nonsmoking households. But smoking by parents, he added, also set a powerful bad example that was worsened by R-rated movies; 17 percent of the children of smokers who often saw such movies tried smoking.
click here to view the abstract of this study
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