Preschoolers Imitate Parent's Bad Habits

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Children 2 to 6 years of age pretending to shop for a party with their dolls are significantly more apt to choose cigarettes if their parents smoke and wine or beer if their parents drink, results of a study show. Children of this age who are allowed to watch PG-13 or R-rated movies are also more apt to choose wine or beer when shopping for a social occasion.

During a role-playing scenario with study investigators, one 6-year-old boy offered a Barbie doll the newspaper and cigarettes with the words: "Have some smokes. Do you like smokes? I like smokes."

When buying Camel cigarettes in the pretend store, a 4-year-old girl said, "I need this for my man. A man needs cigarettes."

Writing in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, investigators say the results of this study "demonstrate that preschoolers have already begun to develop behavioral expectations regarding the use of cigarettes and alcohol."

These data, they add, clearly suggest that watching their parents drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes may lead even preschool-age children to view smoking and drinking as okay or normal in social situations.

And while it's not clear whether these views will cause them to use alcohol and tobacco later on, the data provide "compelling evidence" that the process of imitation, which typically involves shifts in attitudes and expectations about the behavior, begins at a very young age.

Therefore, alcohol and tobacco prevention efforts, which currently target adolescent-age children, may need to be geared to younger children, perhaps as young as 3, and their parents, they conclude.

In the study, Dr. Madeline A. Dalton from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire and others had 120 children, between the ages of 2 and 6, act out a social evening for adults. As part of the role playing, the children had to select items from a miniature grocery store stocked with 73 different products, including beer, wine and cigarettes.

According to the team, roughly 28 percent of the children bought cigarettes and close to 62 percent bought alcohol. Children were roughly four times as likely to buy "smokes" if their parents smoked and three times as likely to buy alcohol if their parents drank alcohol at least once a month. Children who watched PG-13 or R-rated movies were five times as likely to choose wine or beer.

This play behavior, the researchers contend, suggests that even very young children are "highly attentive to the use and enjoyment of alcohol and tobacco and have well-established expectations about how cigarettes and alcohol fit into social settings."

They are even aware of brands at this tender age, the researchers report, noting that at one 6-year-old boy was able to identify the cigarettes he was buying as Marlboros but couldn't identify the brand of his favorite cereal as Lucky Charms.

SOURCE: Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, September 2005.