Should parents stop smoking? Many people say yes as cigarettes contains thousands of harmful chemicals that are detrimental to children. Despite its pernicious effect on children as well as on parents themselves, I don’t agree that parents should be forced to quit smoking.
First, parents have their freedom to smoke. Everyone, including parents, have the right to smoke so it is not so reasonable to force them to quit smoking. It is their own choices and that we should not violate their freedom. If the potential danger of smoking is the reason of the government to prohibit parents to smoke, then should the government ban junk food, alcohol and so on that will also harm our health? Seriously it is impossible, right? It is just their freedom of choices. Instead, the government should encourage parents to quit smoking and educate children not to smoke rather than enforcing parents not to smoke directly.
Second, this policy is unproductive in changing children’s mindsets. One of the aims of this policy is to stop children from following their parents to smoke. However, they may still have the chance to smoke because of the social trend or just because their idols smoke. Therefore, even if their parents quit smoking, children might still smoke under other reasons. It is unable to prevent children from smoking by just banning their parents to smoke that the government has overestimated the effectiveness of this solution. Only when they know the adverse and serious impacts of smoking will they quit smoking voluntarily, so this solution is more effective.
Third, this policy is ineffective in practice. If the government implements this policy, parents will probably not smoke in public areas when they’re carrying their children as they know that they are violating the rules. Therefore, they will smoke at home where the police cannot catch them. We can see that the government mismatches the problem and solution. This solution is still unable to solve the real problem that they don’t want the young to breathe in too much second-hand smoke. Instead, advocating the bad implications for smoking is more practical.
In conclusion, although smoking is bad for health, it doesn’t mean that we should completely forbid parents from smoking, as it is their freedom to do so, and the policy is unproductive. Instead, the government should advocate the consequences of smoking which has better outcome and is easier to implement which does not take away people’s freedom of choices.