Did anyone else's parents smoke in the house

As I said earlier, I did tell my mum how sick her smoking in the car made me feel, and she simply told me I was wrong, and it wasn't the cigarette smoke making me feel so ill on long journeys - then blithely carried on smoking in the car.

Funnily enough, now I travel in a smoke free car, I don't get travel sick - strange that, huh mum.

My mum was in denial about the problems of her smoking right to the end, and would get really snippy if any of us tried to suggest she follow her doctor's advice and stop. She was in hospital for 7 weeks, at one point, and bed bound, so she wasn't able to smoke for the whole time she was there. Dsis and I thought great - she's through the worst of the withdrawal, maybe she will stop for good now, but no. Her reason was that she had a stock of cigarettes in the house, and didn't want to waste them.

All her nighties had burn marks on the front, because she would fall asleep smoking, even in bed - she could have caused a conflagration. Thank heaven for flame proof nighties. When she died, we found out she had undiagnosed extensive lung cancer - the symptoms had been masked by her pain killers (morphine).

When I was a kid on the 60s, we simply didn't notice the smell, because it was everywhere. It was our norm. Because 90% of people smoked, and many lit another as they finished one.

I hate smelling cigarette smoke indoors now, or on people's clothes, because my norm is now smokeless air. Both cigarette smoke and atmospheric smoke from coal burning are rare now, so you're aware of it.

My Dad smoked a pipe this was 80s and early 90s . House / car everywhere by my late teens he was relegated to the basement but it still came up through the floorboards. Re: ENT issues one of my kids had similar and no one ever smoked near them. My first job in the early 90s as a teen in a travel agency I had to go buy the owner and staff the cigarettes they and all the customers smoked at their desks. People used to smoke in cinemas! The whole passive smoking stuff seemed to kick off the early 90s with Roy Castle developing lunch cancer despite being a non-smoker from working in smokey clubs!

I like to think that if my children were begging me to stop something because it was making them feel ill, if I could see that it was making them cough/splutter while I was doing that thing, and if they were pointing me in the direction of all the information about how harmful it was to their health, as was the case with me and my parents, I might stop and think about what I was doing and maybe chance my actions.

I’m sure we will all be the same when our kids are reminding us of all the terrible mistakes we are making now

I find that’s quite a boomer thing - being defensive when reminded of their own actions as parents.

Yes my Dad did. And in the car. And he’d complain about my Mum asking him to open a car window!

I remember my Mum asking him to smoke a pipe rather than cigarettes to reduce the risk of us getting burnt if we were around him, but never did anyone think about the passive smoking!

Yes I have clear memories of my mum doing things like tying my shoe laces with a cigarette hanging out her mouth 🤦‍♀️ she gets really upset if I remind her of it now as she feels so guilty about it but it was very normal back then, everyone was smoking everywhere!

Yes, my dad did. And in the car which I hated. This was 60s and 70s. When I smoked I never did so in the house - I gave up years ago.

My parents were still smoking in the house when I was 16, so 2000. I remember as a child telling my parents about the dangers of passive smoking, and I doubt I’d have made up the information, so I must have got it from somewhere.

It’s a question of degree though. Obviously in hindsight to know if behaviours are dangerous before there is evidence.

But it’s the way you respond to the growing body of evidence around you that counts. A sensible parent with an open mind who reads and digests information about the world will modify their behaviour in response to this evidence.

I would judge a parent know smoked in the house now (or even in the 90s) far more harshly than one who did it in the 70s. Frankly anyone who is still doing it today needs a visit from social services.

There is always a progression in terms of the evidence available. At the moment a) phones are ubiquitous and b) there isn’t a hard canon of validation that confirms they are always unequivocally dangerous. dangerous. So being very hardline about phone use makes you an outlier.

But a responsible parent should be alert to the risks by now and at least take an informed approach to their child’s phone use.

Thinking back, though, the way that the dangers were communicated was quite damaging, psychologically. Most of us were taught at school how bad smoking was, then we’d come home to our parents smoking and worry about them dying. I identify with stories above of people hiding or damaging the cigarettes. I suppose they had to deter us from smoking ourselves, but it was scary and worrying.

I was also worried about nuclear war at the same time too!

But surely that's any addiction though? I'm sure there are plenty of children now who hate their parents drinking alcohol. It's very sad. All addiction is. But that's one thing people seem to forget when calling people thick and disgusting. It IS an addiction. And for people that started young it was advertised and even recommended to lose weight! Alcoholics get so much sympathy on here with people calling it an illness etc. But smoking is just disgusting and they should just stop.
My mum started smoking at 11. As did most of her friends and family around that age. Did I wish when I was a child she didn't smoke? Yes of course. I would have smelled of smoke. But it didn't affect any friendships and I wasn't bullied about it. Obviously other people will have different experiences though. But on the plus side for people on here, she died young of a smoking related illness so was never able to be one of those boomers who benefitted from endless pensions and hogged a big house.

My unless used to the wallpaper in the lounge was brown and had nicotine running down it 🤮

What is interesting is that so many of us from the first generation of people who (a) grew up in smoke-filled houses but (b) never smoked ourselves are now reaching our fifties and sixties. I’d be really interested to know if there is any research on whether our generation’s incidence of lung cancer appearing in our later years is higher than would be expected than for people who were never exposed to smoke. But I suppose the problem is that there are no control examples available to compare us to.
(and in a double whammy, we were also getting sunburnt all the time too…)

I was born in the 50s and can remember barely being able to see across the room because of the cigarette smoke. My clothes must have stank.
can remember leaving someone’s house which smelled of cooked vegetables ( I assume their dinner, my mother very rarely cooked fresh veg) My mother sniffed and said how common they were, the smell in their house. Pot, kettle, black I think.a

i’ve never smoked.

It is sad though reading that children actually vocalised that they hated the smoke, regardless of what was known. They were coughing, it was stinging their eyes and making them feel sick, and they were being ostracised at school. But the parents refused to stop.

I guess selfishness is often an integral part of addiction.

I loathe smoking indoors, in fact I loathe smoking altogether, but I think you’re being unfair. 90s and 00s is years and years ago- nearly 30 years- a generation! Smoking in pubs wasn’t banned until the mid 00s and there was an extraordinary fuss at the time about how people’s freedoms were being removed. There was huge opposition to this. In the 90s it was not accepted that you shouldn’t smoke indoors- and people still do, btw, and they smoke in their cars, too.

My dad did. It was normal in those days.

I hate how rude people are about people who were smoking years and years ago. I'm not really talking about like the 90s and onwards. I mean people saying how thick and disgusting people were smoking in like the 60s and 70s and 80s. It honestly was so common and the effects (especially second hand smoke) were not really known about or mentioned. To say people just "should have known" is ridiculous.
Honestly I'm just waiting for something to be thought of in a similar way in a few years so all younger people can call them thick and disgusting. They "should have known" giving children/teens mobiles phones would cause damage so they were just thick for doing so."

I was born in the early 70s. My parents did not smoke. I remember my mum hating it in the house and did not want others to smoke around us. Yes, people smoked on buses, planes etc and it was socially acceptable.

But we did know that it was not great. I do not agree that everybody was ignorant that it could be dangerous.

And by the 90s there was no excuse.

In the 70s? They genuinely didn't know. Particularly if it was the early 70s.

My brother, born 1960, was a severe asthmatic. Regularly hospitalised. He had regular appointments at the chest clinic, where the doctor made a big thing about dust. Our house regularly has to be wet dusted and hoovered twice a day. Yet he never said a word about my mum and grandparents smoking,or suggest that they didn't smoke in the house.

In the 60s and early 70s smoking was the norm and even when health issues were publicised, it was only in relation to lung cancer. I'd say it was well into the 80s before not smoking in pregnancy became a thing. In 1988 my neighbour decided to stop while she was pregnant. But it wasn't because of the pregnancy, it was so that they would have stopped by the time the baby was born.

I absolutely do judge my parents for smoking indoors in the 80s and 90s. I don’t know if my mother smoked whilst pregnant with me in the 70s, but knowing her she probably did and anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence would know, even back then, that doing that isn’t a good idea.

Bollocks. I remember Roy Castle dying in 1994 from lung cancer caused by secondhand smoke and what a big deal it was in the news

You also used to be able to buy chocolate cigarettes that were rolled I think rice paper or something and came in fake cigarette packets. The one I remember most was marlborough. It was spelled differently but close and the packaging was similar too.

I used to buy them all the time but nobody else seems to remember them. They remember the little white sticks but not those