Parental Partnerships in Helping Teens Avoid Smoking: A Comprehensive Look

Do you know that 90% of smokers start as teenagers? This is why it's crucial to look into how parents can help prevent their kids from picking up this bad habit. Scientists decided to study this by searching through scientific papers and blogs from places like PubMed and Google Scholar. They wanted to see if programs that got parents involved actually made a difference. They found 36 studies between November 2022 and November 2023. These studies involved 29 unique programs for preventing smoking. Most of them focused on prevention, and a few on helping teens quit. They used special numbers called risk ratios to see how effective these programs were. After all the math, they found that programs involving parents did help. Kids were about 16% less likely to start smoking. However, it's not clear if these programs really helped teens quit smoking. Plus, there weren't enough studies to say if these programs work the same for kids from different backgrounds. So, while we know parental involvement helps, there's still more to learn. It's like trying to solve a big puzzle – we've found a few pieces, but there's still a lot left to find.