How to Parent in an Age of Vaping

It is no longer enough to understand the rapid rise of e-cigarettes and the current vaping epidemic. What so many parents really want to know is this: what can we do to help our individual kids?

A brief recap, in case you have missed the zillions of articles pinging around (with a couple of updates from my September piece in the topic): in the US, cigarette smoking has been steadily declining for years now, so much so that smoking could be considered déclassé. That is, until the past couple of years, when smokeless smoking suddenly became a thing. Today, the lungs and brains of people across the US – especially tweens, teens and 20-somethings – are flooded with vapor that looks cleaner than cigarette smoke ever did. But it’s not. It’s probably just as harmful, maybe more so. Over the past few months alone, as these dangers have become apparent in the form of acute illnesses and deaths due to vaping (1604 sick and 34 dead as of October 22), public health advocates are taking action. Dominant e-cig manufacturer Juul, now facing the first vape-related wrongful death lawsuit, has pulled online sales of flavored pods. Juul has said this move is proof that they are not targeting young customers, but most are wary. That’s why there's now a move in congress to ban flavors and restrict vape sales to minors (finally!).

Okay, so now how to parent around all of this. How do we begin conversations with our kids? How often do we need to go back over this same trodden topic? What roles should schools play? And how can we even tell if our kids are inhaling this stuff in the first place? There is no clear path through any of this yet, but here are some suggestions:

· Open your eyes. One out of every four high school seniors has reported vaping in the past month; one out of twenty eighth graders. They are telling random adult researchers, so we know there’s likely underreporting here and the actual number is even higher. If you think this isn’t affecting your community, your school, and possibly your own kid, you had better think again.

· Know what’s underlying the problem. Nicotine is addictive – and super-addictive if you are inhaling salts, the form of nicotine in many vape products. Learn the facts and then pass them along to your kids. They get lots of bad information from their friends and their social media feeds – they need you to correct it for them.

· Remember that it’s hard to identify who’s vaping. That’s why researchers have resorted to dumpster diving to find out who’s inhaling what. Parents, ask your kids if they are vaping. Trust me, they are waiting for you to ask. They may not be fully forthcoming about it, but asking is the first step towards showing concern. Also take a lesson from the scientists: poke around to figure out what your kids are up to. This requires learning what vapes actually look like. (Spoiler alert: they can look like pens, thumb drives, and 50 other nondescript household items – even though I always caution against Googling anything health-related, Google this!).

· Educate yourself about the substances inside the vapes. Some vapes use liquid-based products; others use wax-based ones. Some of these products come from larger companies who do quality control checks while others are acquired online or from friends essentially through a vape black market with zero quality control. Lots of kids are watching online videos to learn how to hack vape pods and refill them with alternate substances like the marijuana derivative THC. You need to learn about all of this and then talk to your kids about what you have learned because many of the vape-related illnesses and deaths have been associated with black market and hacked products.

· Partner with your kid’s school. The student vaping epidemic has schools frantically mobilizing. If your school hasn’t started sending out articles, educating kids and parents alike, then ask them to do so. It’s onerous for schools to be the providers of health information, but they do it for sex and drugs – nicotine education must be added into the curriculum at this point.

· If your child is addicted to nicotine, get help. Resources vary depending upon where you live. The Truth Initiative is a phenomenal organization that can help point you to information and resources for quitting. Remember that this addiction is as real as any other, and so too is the path to getting off nictoine. But it can be very hard, so here are some tips and here’s a new text-based cessation program.

· Don’t judge! If someone has become addicted to nicotine, the goal is to help them rather than to shame them. If your child or someone else’s kid has been manipulated by these companies (and it’s worth noting, big tobacco has a heavy hand in the vape market – they own 35% of Juul), it doesn’t help to simply punish. Nicotine addiction is a serious issue with increasingly worrisome health consequences.