Smoking and Youth Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Smoking and Youth - Essay Example This paper will provide the factors leading to excessive smoking addiction during adolescence, and various approaches that will help diminish this obsession. Adolescence is attracted to smoking owing to various factors.  Ã‚  One of the most prominent reasons why people start smoking at a very young age is the influence of their friends. In other words, peer pressure is the number one cause why teens would smoke.   Secondly, when a child grows up in an environment surrounded by smokers like if a father, uncle, aunt or cousins, smoke, chances of smoking is higher because smoking will appear as a normal activity to him.     In addition, youth today is exposed to television, beauty magazines where they see beautiful images of their favorite celebrities and models smoking, as a result, giving them the impression that it is something advisable, and enhances ones personality. However, once an individual starts tobacco consumption their reasons for smoking keep changing. It is a fact that once a child initiates smoking it becomes an addiction and it is not possible to quit that easily. When asked, the reason youth gave for smoking was either boredom or to relieve stress. Anxiety and stress is related to low self-esteem. Hence, one can say that low- self-respect could be one of the major reasons why youth smoke. Likewise, depression in youth is another important issue that should be considered when it comes to smoking, depressive symptoms seems evident in divorced parents or increased abusive behavior towards the child. In such circumstances, a child would be more inclined to smoking cigarettes to hide the pain and trauma. Hence, research shows the most important factors associated with under- age tobacco consumption is peer pressure, family environment that includes parents and siblings and most importantly low self-esteem.  Studies show that â€Å"each day, between 82,000 and 99,000 young people around the world start smoking†