Talking to Kids About Smoking: Only dumbasses do it.

The ads I see touting the benefits of talking to your kids about smoking always put me off. They say to talk to kids about smoking. They go through role playing. They go through when and how to bring it up. I would imagine, since they are put out by the purveyors of the products themselves, that the ads are proven not to work very well.

I'll tell you what would work. I'll never take up smoking, and I never considered doing it as a teenager either. Why? Because of the way my parents talked to me about it.

It wasn't based on the relative health risks or dealing with peer pressure. It *was* about how smoking was stupid and evil and anyone who did it or was associated with it was an absolute dumbass. That was repeated over and over again at the dinner table.

We had contextual conversations about politics in general, and whenever the topic of the dumbass Republicans came up, we went large on the topic. It related to religious hypocrisy, praying on the poor, the evil of corporate greed, the marketing of poisons to Americans--the whole gamut of apropos topics when discussing the Right. Inevitably, smoking, which met all the criteria, was associated with this, and to this day I have a moral repulsion to smoking.

If we really wanted our kids to stop smoking, we'd have our parents talking in moral terms, not health terms. I don't suppose that will happen--especially associated with the idiot Rupublicans--but it sure would make a difference.