Every teenager learns the bad health effects of smoking during school.  Most teenagers successfully avoid “bad” friends and smoking through peer pressure.  However, although the effect of smoking is known to every teenager, the horrible effects of second hand smoking are foreign to them.  The place where people are exposed to second hand smoking the most is inside their own house.  Therefore, a smoke free home is a healthy, wise, and respectable home.  There are steps that a person can take to make their house a place where smoking is restricted.

A smoke-free home automatically makes one think of a healthy home.  A home without any smoking definitely must be healthy since smoking is very harmful to the body.  Smoking is most notorious for being the cause of lung cancer.  Just one person in the household may damage the health of every other person living in it.  In a typical Korean family, a father is the usual smoker.  Due to Korean traditions, the father has a lot of status and is the head of the family.  This makes it difficult to reprove the father for his actions.  Therefore, the father damages his body by smoking and also destroys the health of his family by creating an environment where they breathe in all the harmful chemicals emitted from the cigarette smoke.  In a home, second hand smoking is worse than outside a home because the bad chemicals are trapped inside the room.  Not only are the chemicals trapped, they can also contaminate the furniture for months.  In addition, second hand smoking can cause many serious diseases that are just as harmful as smoking.  Some of these diseases are heart disease, lung cancer, nasal sinus cancer, bronchitis, pneumonia, and asthma.  This proves that a house with no smokers is much healthier than a house with smokers.

A wise home consists of people who are able to make good decisions.  A wise person makes the right decisions in life and when these prudent people live together, the house is considered a wise home.  One of the important decisions that everyone makes in their life, usually when they are in their teens, is whether to smoke or not to smoke.  This critical decision can affect a person’s life drastically because the choice made can affect the future.  If the person makes the wrong choice, that person may be setting themselves up to an early death through diseases caused by smoking.  On the other hand, if they make the right decision, they will be increasing their life span drastically.  They will also not harm the people around them through second hand smoking.  A wise person considers how harmful smoking can be and the diseases that the person can contract through smoking.  After thinking of the consequences of smoking, the person is able to resist any impulse or peer pressure that burdens them, and reject the cigarette.  The first choice, on whether to smoke or not, is very important because once a person starts smoking, the person can not stop because of the addiction. Soon, the person’s family will be influenced by this act of wisdom, and the wise environment would also influence others that visit the home.  A smoke-free home is a wise home because it portrays the wise people living inside of it.

Respect is a very important quality in any household, but particularly a Korean one.  A smoke-free home is a house full of respect.  The family respects each other so they do not try to harm each other by smoking.  Even when guests are visiting, the guests’ respect of the family prevents them from smoking inside the house.  If there was a smoker in the house who quit smoking because of the concern of the family, the person would receive more respect.  The family members would look up to this person because of the determination to quit an addiction to ensure the family’s health.  Korean fathers usually continue to smoke because they believe that smoking is a sign of dignity and would earn the respect of the other family members.  Ironically, the family’s admiration for the father increases when he quits smoking.  Therefore, a smoke-free home is the key to a respectable home.

In many families, the members say they want to make a change, but never follow through with the actions.  When a family is determined to change their home, they should have a talk with the entire family members and make rules to help the members control themselves.  When guests visit, they should ask them to not smoke inside the house because it could contaminate the furniture, and not to smoke around the family.  They should also try to inform their friends and relatives about the damages of second hand smoking.  To help smokers in the family, they should encourage the smokers to join tobacco cessation programs to help them quit.  These are important steps that one should take in order to create a smoke-free home.