A new study published in Addictive Behaviors looked at the connection between risky parental behavior and the tendency for adolescents to pick up unhealthy habits such as smoking and substance use. Researchers looked at 3,039 children and their mothers, checking in on the families regularly from the child’s birth to adulthood—for more than 30 years. They found that the young adults who had begun smoking at a young age (around 15 or 16 years old) had mothers who engaged in substance use, showed signs of depression and mental health problems, and displayed antisocial behavior during the child’s early years of development. “[Children] usually try to use the parent as a role model during their development,” says Reza Hayatbakhsh, PhD, MD, principle researcher at the University of Queensland, Australia. “They see their parents are smoking, they see their parents drinking alcohol, and they would say, ‘Why not us? If that’s good for my role model, then that could be good for me, too.’” More interestingly, while kids who start smoking early tend to have mothers who smoke as well, kids also tend to pick up the habit just from seeing a parent at a personal, attitudinal low from either depression or similar issues. Dr. Hayatbakhsh attributes this to the self-medication theory: People turn to smoking as a type of “solution” that might help them cope with unsatisfactory environments, in this case caused by depressive behavior by their parents. While all of this may sound awfully dreary, there’s good news: This process of imitation and adaptation applies for the good habits too. Another study called EAT (Eating and Activity in Teens) 2010, recently published in JAMA Pediatrics, studied the effects of different types of body conversations between parents and children. Through analyzing surveys completed separately by parents and children, researchers found that parents who talked about weight, body size, and shape were more likely to have kids who later developed unhealthy eating habits, including extreme dieting, taking laxatives and diuretics, and binging and purging. However, parents who talked to their kids about healthy eating (avoiding direct mention of body size) had kids who were less likely to develop such habits. Moreover, the study showed that having these kinds of health-centric conversations were altogether better than having no conversation at all. So while kids can pick up some unhealthy habits from their parents, they also have the potential to pick up some very good ones, as long as the parent is mindful about how those lessons are taught. Jerica Berge, PhD, MPH, LMFT, an assistant professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Minnesota and one of the researchers behind EAT 2010, emphasizes the importance of parent modeling in tandem with conversations about healthy living in order to effectively promote good health habits in growing kids. “[Ideally] you have these conversations all along as you’re also engaging in family-level physical activity together, and you as a parent are modeling the healthy eating yourself and talking about it regarding yourself before it ever gets to your kid,” says Dr. Berge. Kids have a tendency to imitate every little thing their parents do—even the things you really don’t want them to be copying. Mothers who smoke lead to kids who smoke; conversations about weight lead to self-consciousness about weight. On the other hand, keeping a smile and a healthy bounce in your step can keep the kids away from relying on icky substance behaviors, and demonstrating some good eating habits can encourage your kids to try them out, too. More from Prevention: 13 Healthy Life Lessons To Teach Your Kids
