Smokers need to be aware of the impact their habit is having on their children. It's an impact that is being felt as early as primary school, researchers say.

New research by a team at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, has discovered that parents' smoking is as important as peer pressure in determining whether children will try smoking.Compared with children who never smoked, those who currently smoked were more likely to be living in a single-parent household; have a parent who smoked; have best friends who smoked; believe their parents did not monitor their smoking and would not punish them for smoking; and believe cigarettes are easily available, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse-sponsored research, released in the August issue of the Society for Public Health Education's "Health Education and Behavior."

These children also were more likely to be susceptible to peer pressure and have low grades in school and low behavioral self-control, the study found.

Although many studies have shown that the influence of friends is the single strongest factor in predicting whether children will try smoking, the study by Christine Jackson, Ph.D., and her colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill suggests that interventions "need to focus as much on countering the influence of parent smoking as on countering the influence of peer smoking."

Moreover, programs to keep children from starting to smoke should begin "at least as early as primary grades," not middle school, said the researchers, who spent three years monitoring smoking in a group of fifth-grade children. More than half — 54 percent — had tried smoking by the seventh grade, the researchers found. Almost one-quarter — 22 percent — had tried smoking early in the study, while 16 percent tried smoking late in the study and 16 percent currently smoked regularly.

"The prevailing smoking prevention strategy, which concentrates resources on middle-school prevention programs for adolescents, overlooks the needs of children who are at risk for habitual cigarette smoking," Jackson warned.

In addition, "simply delaying the age at initiation of cigarette smoking is unlikely to reduce the proportion of children who eventually become habitual smokers," Jackson and her colleagues wrote. Instead, they said, efforts should try to modify the important risk factors, one of which is parental monitoring.

Early initiators are not necessarily the ones who continue to smoke, the researchers noted.

"[They] are at greater risk for continued smoking if exposure to parental and peer modeling occurs in combination with susceptibility to peer influence, low parental monitoring, easy access to cigarettes and other risk attributes," they said.

Addresses: Health Education & Behavior, Marc A. Zimmerman, Ph.D., editor, Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, The University of Michigan School of Public Health, 1420 Washington Heights, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2029. Christine Jackson, Ph.D., University of North Carolina, P.O. Box 2688, Chapel Hill, NC 27515; (919) 962-2211, fax (919) 962-2751. National Institute on Drug Abuse, 5600 Fishers Lane, Parklawn Building, Rockville, MD 20857; (301) 443-6480.