Fifty years since Smoking and health - Royal College of Physicians

3. Smoking in children and
vulnerable adults
Smoking in children and vulnerable adults
Professor Amanda Amos Professor of health promotion,
Centre for Population Health Sciences, University of Edinburgh;
and UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies
Preventing smoking in children is a key aim of tobacco control, and there has been
considerable success in reducing smoking uptake in Britain over the last few years.
Between 1996 and 2010 the prevalence of regular smoking among 15-year-olds
declined from 31% to 13% in England, and from 30% to 13% in Scotland. However,
there are considerable challenges in maintaining this decline, particularly as smoking
has become increasingly concentrated among disadvantaged young people. Also
there has been a much more modest reduction in smoking rates among older British
adolescents, from 29% of 16- to 19-year-olds in 1996 to 24% in 2009.
A recent review of research on smoking among young people identifi ed a range of factors
operating at the individual, social, community and societal levels, which increase children’s
and young people’s risk of becoming smokers. In particular, smoking uptake is linked to
disadvantaged social, educational and economic trajectories. Young people are most at risk
of becoming smokers if they grow up in families and communities where smoking is the norm
and where they have access to cigarettes. For example, children whose parents and/or siblings
smoke are more likely to become smokers. During adolescence they move into social networks
and peer groups with similar smoking norms, where smoking is valued in social relationships,
and they think that smoking helps project the type of image to which they (and their friends)
aspire. Young smokers are also more likely to believe that smoking helps them to deal with
diffi cult psychosocial aspects of adolescence and transition, including stress, anxiety
and boredom.
Markers of disadvantage and exclusion in adolescence continue to play an important role
in smoking in young adults and adults more generally. For example, in Scotland young adults
© Royal College of Physicians 2012 9