Smoking doesn't just harm children's health — it also may lower their performance in school and cost their families money. That's because children who live in homes where at least one person smokes inside the house miss more days of school than children who live in nonsmoking homes, researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston reported this week. Their nationwide study, which was published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, backs up findings of earlier research in California and New Jersey.
The team combed through federal survey data to assess the link between smoking and school absenteeism. Respondents to the 2005 National Health Interview Study had provided information about the number of people who smoked in their homes, children's general health, incidence of ear infection over the previous 12 months, incidence of a cold over the previous two weeks and asthma diagnosis, among other health and demographic details. The researchers looked at children between age 6 and 11, excluding children 12 and above to minimize chances that smoke exposure — and missed school — came from students themselves doing the smoking.
More than 14 percent of the children in their sample lived in a house where at least one person smoked indoors, and 6 percent lived in a home where two or more people did. Echoing demographics of smokers and nonsmokers in general, surveyed homes with no indoor smoking were more highly educated, earned higher incomes and were more likely to be Latino.
The researchers found that living with someone who smoked in the home raised a child's likelihood of missing school and living with more than one person who smoked in the home raised that likelihood even higher: Children living with one adult who smoked in the home had 1.06 more days absent from school per year than children who lived with none. Children who lived with two or more adults who smoked in the home missed 1.54 more days than smoke-free children.
In all, the authors attributed 24 percent of absences among children with one smoker in the house to smoking-related illness. For children living with two or more indoor smokers, that went up to 34 percent of absences. A child's likelihood of having three or more ear infections in a year went up with the number of people who smoked in the house. Children with two smokers in the house had more colds. But the survey data uncovered no relationship between smoking in the house and asthma.
Missing school has obvious ramifications for educational performance. But it also can hit families' pocketbooks when parents have to miss work to nurse a child's cold or ear infection. The researchers estimated that caregivers' time tending to children who were absent from school amounted to $227 million per year. "When young children are home from school, parents may miss time at work or have to find alternative sources of child care. Such a burden will be especially acute for low-income parents ... and single parents. Parents working low-paying jobs at small business may even be vulnerable to job loss," they wrote.