Why Children Smoke in 2015 and Prospects for Stopping Them: a Review of Current Literature

Abstract

This paper is a review of the current research from 2014 to early 2015 on why children smoke and ways of preventing them from starting. Tobacco use is a major preventable reason for mortality worldwide. We reviewed articles from PsycInfo and PubMed with key words, resulting in 245 articles. After the examining of these articles, 76 articles were used in the final review. The commonly reported results for risk factors in the articles reported for adolescent smoking including parental/family/peer influences, depression symptoms, other substance use, stress/negative life events, and low academic performance. In prevention of smoking, the result of the current literature highlighted school-based prevention, tobacco control policy, preventive/protective factors, health-care provider influences, and peer and parental influences as possible streams to target prevention. Significant progress and research has been made over the past year, and future research is needed to continue the understanding of the risk factors of smoking for each generation. If we can understand the reasons on why adolescents smoke, we can prevent them from smoking, which will lead to a decrease in morbidity and mortality from smoking worldwide.