There is so much information on the dangers of nicotine exposure to children that one would think that adults would view children using nicotine-containing tobacco products as “definitely harmful” if surveyed about teen smoking. Well—think again. According to an interesting study by Kemp et al. (10.1542/peds.2018-0051), being early released this week in our journal, that is not the case. The authors surveyed close to 12,000 parents nationally regarding what their level of perceived harmfulness of nicotine to children was. The analysis was stratified by race, sex, education, parent use of a tobacco product. While you can be reassured that most respondents said nicotine use in children was “definitely harmful,” male respondents had lower odds of viewing nicotine as harmful compared to females and those using tobacco products also had lower odds of finding nicotine in children harmful.
Kemp and colleagues show us that the aggregate belief that all adults view nicotine as definitely harmful is not true—and it is our job to smoke out those who do not believe their children are at risk when they use nicotine in a variety of tobacco products. Read this study and you may want to work even harder to ensure that your patients better understand the dangers of nicotine.
