Playing on the floor. Sucking their thumb. Riding in a car where someone smoked. These are all ways children can be exposed to thirdhand smoke. But do parents really know the risks? And how concerned are they?
Dr. Melinda Mahabee-Gittens from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center led a study to see how parents who do not smoke felt about the risks of thirdhand smoke exposure.
“A lot of parents had never heard of it,” Mahabee-Gittens said about parents interviewed for the study. Luckily, some parents knew that thirdhand smoke refers to the chemical residue left behind after smoking, but how concerned they were about the health risks to children varied.
To assess how beliefs varied, the research team gave parents who do not smoke two hypothetical scenarios where their child is exposed to thirdhand smoke to see if they change their responses. The scenarios varied in that their child was found to have either a low or high level of nicotine on their hands. The team also listed ways to reduce the child’s exposure and asked the parents to choose which options they would do.
Parents tended to be more concerned of how thirdhand smoke would affect their child’s health in the high nicotine-level scenario. Parents said their top three ways to reduce exposure would be to first to deep clean their home, followed by not letting people smoke in their home, and lastly not letting people smoke in their car. In the low-level scenario, parents favored not letting people smoke in their home or car over deep cleaning. Mahabee-Gittens said parents likely chose cleaning first in the high-level scenario because parents were more concerned for their child’s health and wanted to take stronger action.
“They want to do something that’s tangible,” Mahabee-Gittens said. “They want something to physically do.”
Parents with incomes $50,000 and under or $120,000 and over were more concerned for their child’s health than parents earning between those amounts, which Mahabee-Gittens said she found surprising. In addition, mothers were more concerned than fathers.
Mahabee-Gittens said she was glad that lower-income parents were concerned about thirdhand smoke exposure as their children are at the highest risk of exposure. Parents with lower incomes tend to live in apartments, which have a higher risk of having thirdhand smoke reservoirs. The concerns of parents could inspire apartment management to enforce strict no smoking rules, she said.
“Once everyone knows thirdhand smoke exposure is real, the next step is telling them to try to enforce these rules,” she said.
Click here to read the study.
