Parent educators for teenage smoking behavior

Abstract

Abstract Background Several studies have shown that there is a significant relationship between teenagers and parental smoking behavior. This study was to empower parent (smokers and non-smokers) to raise parents’ concern, to describe teenagers’ knowledge about smoking and its dangers, to reduce the status of teenage smoking behavior, and to decrease the number of cigarettes smoked/day. Methods This was a quasi-experimental study, with a pretest-posttest group design. The respondents were 649 students from the 8th grade in junior high schools from three provinces in Indonesia divided into two intervention groups and one control group. The dependent variable was the implementation of parent educators (smokers and non-smokers) who were trained about smoking and its dangers. Data were analyzed by analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the Kruskal-Wallis test, with a significant level of 0.05. Results The results showed that the smoking parent educator model increased the frequency of parent concern significantly and improved knowledge about the dangers of smoking insignificantly; whereas the non-smoker parent educator model decreased the number of respondents’ frequent smoking status insignificantly and reduced the number of cigarettes smoked /day by the frequent smoker respondents significantly. Conclusion The parent educator model can be used for preventing teenage smoking behavior.