What would you do if you caught your kid vaping at home? Worse yet, what would you do if you received a call from your child’s school to say she/he had been found vaping in the bathroom?

But this is more than a “what if?”. While some of us may be sure that our daughters and sons do not smoke, nor vape, because we parents clean the backpacks, do the laundry, tidy the bedrooms, etc, we have no way of knowing, with absolute certainty, that they have not been offered it at school (and tried one “puff”, or even more). I do not like to be the parent who says, “My child would never……”, because, truthfully, I do not want to be the fool who is naive enough to believe that even the most well-behaved children won’t sneak around and do something of which their parents would not approve! It happens. Heck, weren’t we teenagers once?! In fact, one day during the summer holiday one of my brother’s and I (we were 15 and almost 13 years old), along with a few friends, took a bottle of liquor from the cabinet and hid it. After our parents went to bed, we went to get the bottle and it had gone. WHAT!! WHO could have taken it? Well, we had our answer the next day, when the cabinet was opened by my mum and there it was. She never said a single word to us…..until years and years later, when we all had a good giggle about it. Our parents believed in allowing us to take a couple sips of wine or beer when we were that age, but under their supervision. It did not mean we could stash a bottle of vodka behind a bush and drink the entire thing with our friends in the secrecy of the night! Parents used to know everything, but it simply is not the case nowadays. Social media and personal electronic devices have made that the certainty!

I suspect that our mum heard us discussing our plot to deceive because conversations were had face to face or on a landline. There was no private texting on Snapchat, WhatsApp, or the like. Our conversations with our friends were essentially “public” within the house. Nowadays, all kinds of plotting and planning can occur without us knowing, and while there is a chance you may be home to monitor what your children are doing, there are tiny windows of opportunity at school, larger ones at parties and perhaps at someone’s house if those children are not supervised. As for teenagers, adults tend to leave them to their own devices (pardon the pun) as they get older.

Recognising that the covert texting is occurring, where on earth are these kids getting the idea to start vaping? Some may be learning from their peers, but it’s a real and broadly spread issue, so what has been the root cause and the catalyst of why there are so many teenagers, and even pre-teens, who vape? Marketing…..but not the traditional marketing to which we were exposed when we were young. There’s a new kind, one which we don’t even realise is causing a huge problem as we are literally not seeing it. Social media is the most influential marketing tool for any product one wishes to push on children, and they don’t even have to go searching for it. The algorithms are set to advertise any product that will pull your teenagers and young children in to keep scrolling.

“I don’t see any ads on my social media feeds about vaping,” some of you may say. For the record, I don’t either. But it is clear from my age and my interests that it is unlikely that my algorithm would bring such ads to my feeds. Indeed, it doesn’t even need to be an interest of your child to show up on his or her feeds. And if they are not seeing actual advertisements, they are watching and/or following social media influencers and content creators (all rather boring sets of people), who either use e-cigarettes and/or are being paid to “use” them and put them in their online content. Ironic, considering the legal age here in Jamaica (and many other countries) to purchase and use any vaping products is 18 years old. Some states in the USA require you to be 21 years old. So why is it that online ads are being pushed by social media platforms to the screens of teens? Nothing like the bottomline of wishing to generate billions of dollars! This is what we are battling with, my friends, and there is only one way for this war on e-cigarettes to end. We must keep pushing for legislators to make these big tech, social media companies put the safety of our children above all else. There has to be real consequences for these companies, with criminal charges that include heavy fines and imprisonment.

Listen, 75 years ago it was deemed acceptable to advertise cigarettes on national television and radio, until it was banned 20 years later. E-cigarette ads have been running for 12-14 years, with a rapid increase in online ads of all vaping products in the last 8 years. Yes, just before Covid started, restrictions were technically put in place by Meta to prevent influencers from promoting the use of branded vaping paraphernalia, but this has not stopped them, with Instagram and TikTok being two of the biggest culprits. What are two extremely popular social media platforms for teenagers? Instagram and TikTok. I also want to note that while both these platforms have a legally required age of 13 years old for users (16 years old in some countries), many children as young as 10 years old have accounts, because all they need to do is lie about their age. And do not fool yourselves, many of you know that your underage child uses these platforms. They may tell you that they’re only looking at music videos, or sports-related content, or “that’s how my friends communicate,” or they may even insist that it’s social suicide NOT to have Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, but I can promise you, from personal experience it is NOT social suicide. Please do not let your children use these platforms and hold off until they are at least 15 or 16 years old. I promise you, you will not regret it. No future adult will ever look back and say they wished they had been on social media when they were a child or young teen! These greedy social media platforms do not have your child’s best interest in mind and the influencers that “everyone” is talking about are vapid and just as greedy as the soapbox upon which they stand.

Emma@becyberbright.com

For information on the harm e-cigarettes and vaping causes, please read this paper published in the National Library of Medicine: Electronic Cigarette Harms: Aggregate Evidence Shows Damage to Biological Systems

Please also check out the American Lung Institution’s The Impact of E-Cigarettes on the Lung