Young people’s perceptions of parental attitudes and rules about smoking are associated with youth smoking, and these perceptions may be an even stronger influence on youth smoking than parental smoking behaviour. Participants in the Health Promotion Agency’s (HPA’s) Youth Insights Survey (YIS) were asked to ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’, or to indicate ‘don’t know’ in response to the following statements:
- My parents or caregivers would be upset if I was caught smoking cigarettes/tobacco.
- My parents or caregivers have set rules with me about not smoking cigarettes/tobacco.
Methodology
Participants in the 2012 YIS were asked to ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’, or to indicate ‘don’t know’ in response to the following statements:
- ‘My parents or caregivers would be upset if I was caught smoking cigarettes/tobacco.’
- ‘My parents or caregivers have set rules with me about not smoking cigarettes/tobacco.’
Overall responses were examined before assessing potential differences in the proportion of respondents agreeing with the above statements by:
- smoking status
- susceptibility to smoking
- parental smoking status
- past-year quit attempts
- ethnicity
- gender.
Only those differences that were statistically significant (p < .05) are reported.
Further analyses were undertaken to examine changes over time in young people’s perceptions of parental attitudes and rules about smoking as these questions were also asked in 2006, 2008, and 2010.
Key Results
- Around nine in 10 young people said their parents would be upset if they were caught smoking. Those who were most likely to say this were those with non-smoking parents, and those who had never smoked.
- Six in 10 young people said that their parents had set rules with them about not smoking. Those who were more likely to say this were never smokers who were defined as not susceptible to start smoking in the future, and those who had tried to quit smoking during the past year. Young people were equally likely to say that their parents had set rules with them about not smoking, regardless of whether their parents smoked or not.
- Young people were more likely to ‘agree’ that their parents or caregivers would be upset if they were caught smoking in 2012 compared with all previous years. Young people were also more likely to ‘agree’ that their parents or caregivers had set rules about not smoking cigarettes/tobacco in 2012 compared with 2006, but had similar agreement to 2008 and 2010.