High-school students who hold part-time jobs may be more likely to start smoking than teens who don't join the after-school and weekend workforce, a new study suggests.  

The study of Grade 10 and 11 students in Baltimore, Md., shows that those who took jobs, often in retail outlets and fast-food or other restaurants, had a greater propensity to begin lighting up – and that trend was most pronounced among teens who worked the most hours per week.

"Of those who didn't smoke at Grade 10, kids who [began working] were at least three times more likely to start smoking than kids who didn't start working," lead author Rajeev Ramchand, a psychiatric epidemiologist, said Thursday from Arlington, Va.

"What we found was the kids who worked more than 10 hours a week on average had an earlier age of [smoking] initiation. So they started to smoke ahead of their peers," said Ramchand, who conducted the study with colleagues as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. He now works for the think-tank Rand Corp.

The researchers suggest a number of reasons for the change in smoking status.

For one, teens may be in places where smoking is more common or acceptable, and exposed on the job to older youth or to adults who are more likely to smoke, Ramchand said.

"Second is that they can now buy cigarettes, as before they may have not had the means, the money, to buy cigarettes," he said.

Dr. Roberta Ferrence, executive director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit in Toronto, said she is not surprised at the findings.

"If you're in a workplace, you're away from your parents, you're away from the social controls you might have if you were at school or at home," said Ferrence, who's also a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

"So you may be more likely to have the freedom to smoke and nobody's going to see you who might tell you not to."

Taking a part-time job changes a teen's relationship with family members, Ramchand said, and that can strongly affect behaviour.

"When kids start working, we know from previous research, their bonds with their parents tend to weaken," he said.

"So whereas in the past some have proposed that your bonds to your parents actually prevent you from drug-using behaviours like tobacco smoking, when you work, a parent kind of releases those bonds and ... that freedom may increase the likelihood to smoke."

The work itself may also contribute to the decision to pick up the habit, he said.

Since many part-time jobs can be repetitive and monotonous, a smoke break is a means of escaping boredom.

"Kids don't report that their jobs themselves are very stressful," he said, but the combination of getting their homework done, playing sports and working creates stress.

"And they may turn to cigarettes as a kind of self-medication to relieve that stress," Ramchand said.
  
The teen smoking study is part of a larger ongoing study of almost 800 Baltimore children, who were enrolled in the study in Grade 1.