Blog 10

In “Imitation of Film: Here’s Smoking at you, Kid” Nicholas Balakar states that many ten-fourteen-year-children begin smoking after seeing the movies to imitate famous actors. Also, Dr. James D. Sargent’s study shows that children have double risk of begin smoking after seeing R-rated movies. However, Dr. James said truth that the study regarded only young adolescents because other who is oldest might be to start smoking before they watching the investigated movies. I think Nicholas Balakar is right that most of the children start smoking because they want to imitate the famous people from R-rated movies; they believe that they have to take example from those protagonists, and recently cigarettes TV advertisements affected on teens smoking.

Younger teenagers spend a lot of time front the television and in the cinema. Especially they don’t want miss any celebrated or well-known movies. At that time, the teens want to imitate their favorite actors, especially simple things such as smoking. I know even in cartoons we can observe the episodes of the smoking; for example, in “Texas Tom”, in well-known cartoon “Tom and Jerry” Tom trippingly began to smoke when he seduced a beautiful kitty. Thus, any teen that spends a lot of time to view movies or cartoons where his/her favorite actor or characters smokes can exposure to become smokers.

For some teens is important to take example from their favorite protagonists because at that time, in their minds occur fast changes that confused them of everything. They have some psychological obstacles such as conversation with peers and parents and they want to do everything themselves, but they don’t know how do it. Therefore, they always try to find someone who can be their favorites to take example by them. For instance, recently I was waiting the bus at the bus station and saw one teen who smoked near to me. We made small talk with each other. When I asked him why he started smoking, he said that his favorite actor, whom I unfortunately forget, smokes unusual not like always. He started to display me what he had learned. The teen said that he spent a lot of time and many cigarettes to learn that type of smoking, and he wants to be like his actor. As a result, teens find out someone to imitate him or her.

Next, a few years ago, we could observe ads of cigarettes on TV. Sometime, the cigarettes were advertised by famous people. The children spent a lot of time front of the TV how I said above; so, they could see and take up smoking because of curiosity, or to look like adults. I remember the story how my close friend started to smoke. She started smoking at 14 just for curiosity. She said that at that time the smoking was so cool. So, her peers were delighted by her because she looked a modern. In addition, she bought and tried all of the commercial cigarettes that showed on TV. Therefore, the first reason for smoking was caused by advertisements. At that time, many teens had the greatest exposure to smoking because of commercials.

In short, the famous movies influenced to take up children smoking because of they want to imitate the well-know actors. Also, smoking increased by reason of commercials that children can see everywhere. Last few years cigarettes were prohibited to show on TV. It caused to reduce number of teen’s smoking. I think if our society will seriously take care about children antismoking we can make away of this problem.