Youth Smoking & Maternal Risk Factors

Cigarette use by adolescents declined between 2002 and 2008, but about 1.4 million youth age 11 to 17 started smoking in 2008. According to recent SAMHSA data, adolescents age 12 to 17 living with their mothers may face risk factors at home that contribute to smoking.

Among adolescents living with their mothers, 9.7 percent lived with mothers who had major depressive episode (MDE) in the past year, and 25.6 percent lived with mothers who used cigarettes in the past month.

Adolescents living with mothers who had past-year MDE had a higher rate of past-month smoking than those living with mothers who did not have MDE (14.3 versus 7.9 percent), and adolescents were more likely to smoke if their mothers smoked than if their mothers did not smoke (16.9 versus 5.8 percent).

The rate of smoking among adolescents living with their mothers was 5.6 percent for adolescents whose mothers neither smoked in the past month nor had a past-year MDE, 8.1 percent for those whose mothers had MDE only, 15.5 percent for those whose mothers smoked only, and 25.3 percent for adolescents exposed to both maternal MDE and maternal smoking.

For more information, download Adolescent Smoking and Maternal Risk Factors.