Health Challenges

Cigarette smoking has been called “slow-motion suicide” because of the well-documented relationship between smoking and a number of serious causes of death. For tweens, there is another important reason to avoid tobacco use: tobacco is classified as a “ gateway” drug to many other drugs and drug-related behaviors. Surveys indicate that most tweens are aware of the hazards of cigarette smoking, yet approximately 1 million begin smoking or chewing tobacco each year.

Tweens typically have two attitudes that make them more susceptible to using tobacco: they believe they are immortal and are more concerned with the present than with the future.

Having a friend who smokes usually influences tween smoking, but peers are not the only influence on tween tobacco use. If a parent smokes, this indicates to the tween that it is a normal behavior and smoking, whether in television, movie, or sporting events, makes tobacco use attractive and downplays the negative health consequences.

• Focus on short-term rather than long-term affects of smoking. Focus on immediate concerns such as gaining acceptance, becoming independent, and being attractive.
  
  
• Emphasize the negative short-term effects of smoking, for example reduced fitness, foul-smelling breath and clothes, unattractiveness (such as yellow teeth), and reduced peer acceptance (as overall group attitudes favor non-use).
  
  
• Project consistent anti-smoking messages in your family. Peers and the advertising world can send messages that encourage tobacco use, but as a parent you need to educate your tween early and remind them of the impact smoking can have on their lives.
  
  
• Communicate openly with your youth about the facts of tobacco use, but avoid using scare tactics, which often encourage rebellious behavior. Involve your tween in healthy social activities.
  
  
• Parents and family members can promote a tobacco-free norm by establishing a hard-line disapproval of tobacco use. Even parents who smoke can express their regrets of becoming addicted to nicotine, which is controlling their own smoking behavior.

Tweens might not think much about what they eat or even about how it will affect them tomorrow or twenty years from now. But, over the past several decades, researchers have learned a lot about how a nutritious diet during childhood and adolescence works to prevent the onset of damaging adult diseases.

One long-lasting effect of poor nutrition during adolescence is osteoporosis, a bone-crippling disease characterized by low bone mass and an increase in fragile bones. While it was largely seen as an elderly woman’s disease, osteoporosis is now being recognized as an adolescent disease. Adolescent bodies are tailor-made to “bone up” on calcium. Bones grow and incorporate calcium most rapidly during the tween years, with approximately 90 percent of adult bone mass built by age 17.

To reach the daily-recommended amount of calcium, tweens need to consume four high-calcium food servings per day. Each 8-ounce glass of milk and each cup of yogurt has about 300 mg of calcium.

As excellent as milk is for the bones, it and other dairy products are not the only foods that contain calcium. All groups in the Food Guide Pyramid, in fact, offer calcium. An easy daily plan would be to have a high calcium source at each meal and as a snack.

While osteoporosis may seem far away, small changes in a tween’s diet today can help insure better bones in their later years.