The role of smoking-cessation-specific parenting in adolescent smoking-specific cognitions and readiness to quit

Background: An instrument assessing smoking-cessation-specific parenting was developed and tested in relation to a) the pros of smoking and quitting and self-efficacy to resist smoking, and b) adolescent readiness to quit. Methods: Cross-sectional survey data from 998 Dutch adolescents who smoked regularly were used to perform structural equation analyses. Results: Adolescents who perceived relatively few advantages of smoking and many benefits of quitting reported a high readiness to quit. Self-efficacy was not related to readiness to quit. Smoking-cessation-specific parenting was both directly related to a high readiness to quit, and indirectly through the perceived pros of quitting. Also, if one or both parents were smokers, adolescents reported experiencing less smoking-cessation-specific parenting and a lower readiness to quit. However, in general, differences in paths were not found between adolescents with two parents who did not smoke and adolescents with one or two parents who smoked. Conclusion: Given that anti-smoking socialisation has not yet been operationalised in terms of smoking-cessation-specific parenting, the present results will warrant further research into smoking-cessation-specific parenting in relation to adolescent smoking cessation. Further, parental smoking should not discourage parents from engaging in smoking-cessation-specific parenting as its relations with smoking cognitions and readiness to quit were highly similar in both the group with two parents who did not smoke and the group with one or two parents who smoked.