I agree, LAJGirl! It should definitely be approached differently.

That's an interesting point you made about how a strong-minded child will make that decision to smoke just to go against an authority figure. I was precisely that type of child, myself (I loved to sneak cigarettes when I was a teenager simply because everyone thought it was so appalling.)

Pardon the slight detour from our original thread topic here. I've been reading some interesting information recently in school about how a similar sort of conditioning happens in the making of compulsive overeaters, another type of addiction, only to food. The tendency to become overeaters as opposed to normal eaters who eat when they're hungry and stop when they've had enough is conditioning/programming that happens very early in kids--before the age of 3. When parents do a lot of food-limiting and taking away of food from toddlers in hopes that they won't get too much or eat the wrong things (sometimes it's simply a matter of trying to limit what parent deem "bad" foods like sweets), kids, who are these naturally smart, intuitive, wonderful creatures, learn that food is more powerful or magical than it really is. That leads them to want more of it, and, later, to want to hoard it and/or overeat it. It's the denial of food that sets in mind that programming that tells kids food is magical and needs to be eaten in greater quantities since, as they've already seen, it might be denied them. Parents who let their toddlers eat what they want and don't limit or deny foods let them learn to be normal eaters. It's not quite the same thing as the sort of "rebellion" motivation that leads some kids to be smokers or risk-takers of other types, but I still find it interesting.

Sorry for the detour--and again, before that, the slam at intelligence. Cigarette addiction is a serious habit. I once heard an addiction doctor say it's as powerful and hard-to-break a physical habit as heroin addiction, and I believe him.