How can we stop the young peoples’ smoking problem in Europe?

First of all we have the question: Why do so many young people smoke?

The main problem exists in the social environment of young people. There’re too many adults who support them in getting cigarettes and other drugs. Very often young people have problems because of the peer pressure so the youth needs more security in their personal environment especially in their families. If parents told them more about bad effects smoking has and if they had more understanding for their children´s situation, there would be more trust between children and parents.

As we can see, it’s very important for adults to get more information about the smoking problems.  With this information, it´s easier for parents to teach their children about the danger of smoking. Very often adults simply ignore this problem, that’s one of the biggest mistake they can do.

Parents’ help, understanding and trust are the best way to protect young people from peer pressure!

Another big problem is that many young people don´t take the consequences of smoking seriously. It seems to be unreal and not authentic. It seems that they can´t imagine or just ignore the possibility of getting cancer. So we have to make them aware of the consequences and that they are realistic. in In most of the European countries there´re projects but they´re not really popular. Some cancer organizations offer young people to talk with victims of cancer especially lung cancer patients.  A governments’ research shows that the majority of students at schools who take part in those projects don’t smoke.  So it´s important to talk about the effects of smoking!

In poor countries like Bulgaria we can find the largest number of young smokers. Very often dealing with cigarettes and drugs is the main income in poor countries. The low number of jobs and education (schools, universities) are two of the reasons for this problematic fact. So first of all these countries need more education for example in schools. There´re already some voluntary projects from teachers, people working health centres and a lot of others. They go to these countries to teach and tell young people about smoking and its negative effects.

Sadly there´re lots of countries where smoking is an old tradition.  Here the most adults are smokers so they´re bad examples for children. If children see that everybody smokes, it´s not easy for them to see the danger of smoking. They take adults (especially their parents) as role models so if they smoke, they’ll also smoke.

If there were less adult smokers, there would also be less young smokers!

 L.B. 9F2