JoySpeaking.Com

I don’t know about you, but when we’re riding a cab, a host of things tend to irritate me – like people talking into mobile phones while reverse parking or not indicating at roundabouts. Occasionally, I’ll see something that really angers me – like a car shooting out of a driveway without the driver checking for pedestrians. But recently I saw something that made me see the proverbial red mist.
Sitting in traffic, I looked over and saw a mother and father in the front seats of the car beside us, their two kids in booster seats in the back. Actually, it was hard to see the kids because the car was full of smoke – both parents were smoking cigarettes with the windows up and aircon blowing smoke into their kids’ faces. I stared, open mouthed, for a couple of seconds and then they were gone, but the image remained on my retinas. “What are those people thinking?” I wondered aloud, after recovering from the disturbing sight of my spluttering face in the mirror. “Are they even thinking at all?!”
The car is particularly bad place to be smoking – for obvious reasons .
For most of us, the sight of a pregnant woman smoking is pretty confronting, but for some of us, seeing people smoking around kids – even babies – doesn’t seem to elicit the same response. But I just don’t get how anyone can be so selfish as to inflict their second-hand smoke on children – and not only in the car, but in a park, on the footpath, in their own homes.
We parents are striving hard to protect our children, give them the best that we can, secure their future by getting children’s life insurance and provide better education and all that we can but others are just putting their kids health at risk.
So I guess it all comes down to education. Perhaps we need a national campaign highlighting the fact that children exposed to cigarette smoke in cars are more than twice as likely as other kids to develop asthma. Or that children in ’smoking households’ tend to experience more middle-ear infections and upper and lower respiratory-tract infections, as well as having reduced lung function and oxygen flow to tissues, than kids who aren’t exposed to tobacco smoke in the home. Then there’s cigarette smoke’s contribution to sudden Infant Death Syndrome, meninggococcal infections, childhood cancers and leukemias, raised cholesterol levels and initiation of heart disease, and many other nasties.
There are so many reasons not to smoke around the kids, so please think and don’t smoke inside the car with kids.