Smoking

Try to impress this fact upon your child without preaching. Present "smoking is bad for you" as fact, not as your opinion. Take subtle opportunities to point out the misery smoking can cause in a person's life. Examples can be a smoker agonizing through a hacking smoker's cough or news stories of people suffering from lung cancer. Let these examples carry your message. Your kid will pick up the message and think they've figured it out for themselves. If you preach, you run the risk of this becoming one of your rules and hang-ups they choose to exert their independence over. In other words, it's a perfect thing to rebel about later. In these younger years, try to establish "smoking is yucky" as one of their ideas, not yours.