For the Last Time! Butt Out Near Pregnant Mothers

Smokers can perform amazing feats of logical gymnastics.

While there have been a number of programs to convince pregnant women not to smoke, there hasn’t been much to convince those around pregnant women to butt out. You’d think people would know that secondhand smoke can be more harmful than inhaling the death stick yourself, but no. When smokers light up, it’s because they really have convinced themselves they aren’t hurting anyone. Theoretically, they aren’t stupid, just addicted.

As a result, cancer rates are up, kids are born with birth defects, the environment is suffering and now, a new study has found the children whose mothers were exposed to secondhand smoke while pregnant, are more psychologically vulnerable than those whose mothers weren’t exposed.

University of Washington psychologists, Lisa Gatzke-Kopp and Theodore Beauchaine found that children whose mothers smoke or were exposed to secondhand smoke had more symptoms of ADHD and conduct disorder than children whose mothers had smoke free pregnancies.

Children with ADHD are more likely to engage in aggressive behavior, skip school, fight, experience academic failure, break any and all rules, abuses drugs and other substances, steal and destroy property.

The researchers compared three groups of 7- to 15-year-old children, all of whom had behavioral and psychological problems. One group had no prenatal smoke exposure, the second group had mothers who smoked during the last six months of pregnancy and the third comprised children whose mothers were exposed to second-hand smoke. The kids in the second two groups were worse off than those in the first.

The study appears in the latest issue of Child Psychiatry and Human Development.