This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Parental smoking intensifies childhood poverty in UK

Smoking places an additional significant financial burden on considerable populations of children residing in low-income households in the United Kingdom, according to recent study results.

“Governments have a duty to ensure that tobacco control policies are fully implemented to minimize this effect,” Charmaine Belvin, of the division of epidemiology and public health at the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom, and colleagues wrote.

The researchers sought to demonstrate the first estimate of the extent to which parental smoking exacerbates childhood poverty in the United Kingdom. The study included combined data from the 2012 Households Below Average Income report and the 2012 Opinions and Lifestyle Survey to estimate the number of children living in poor households containing smokers. They also sought to assess the expenditure of typical smokers in these households on tobacco as well as the numbers of children brought into poverty if smoking expenditures were subtracted from household income.

Results indicated that an estimated 1.1 million children were living in poverty during 2012 with at least one parental smoker.

The researchers further estimated that 68% of female smokers and 55% of male smokers mainly smoke cigarettes, which correlated to weekly cigarette expenditures of $48.90 for women and $53.50 for men. When the researchers subtracted parental tobacco expenditures from household income, there was an additional 432,000 children categorized as living in poverty.

Additional estimates indicated that three quarters of a million children residing in households with an income between 60% and 70% of the median reside in a home with at least one parental smoker.

“In this study, we have addressed a contributor to child poverty that has not, to our knowledge, previously been quantified in this context and falls outside standard child poverty statistics,” Belvin and colleagues wrote. “Effective tobacco control interventions which enable low income smokers to quit, can thus potentially play an important role in reducing the burden of child poverty, and may improve child health and wellbeing by more than just the removal of direct effects of tobacco smoke.”

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.