Have you ever been chatting on the phone? It is someone who you know really well and you have not spoken to them in ages. You know the way it is, you are caught up in the conversation. You have a few cigarettes while you talk, the last of which you put out in your water glass. You are having a good time, remember, and you do not feel like getting up to empty the ashtray.

Your daughter comes up to you. She is only little and she can barely see over the table top, but she is mobile and nimble, and in this case she is also very thirsty. So while you look the other way she takes the glass of cigarette water and drinks it.

Two hours later, as she moans and cries over her very upset stomach, do you feel guilty? Do you now regret not stopping your conversation to get an ashtray? You do everything you can to comfort her. You are her parent after all. But an hour later, you light up again. This is the definition of bad news. You are the architect of a powerfully frightening contradiction. You caused the stomach upset with a cigarette, you've spent the past hour apologizing for it and now here you are lighting up again.

Smoking and child rearing are a particularly bad combination. It takes many years for children to recognize the true realities of life, which includes its inherent dangers. This is your role. You must protect them until they can do this for themselves. So understand well, here and now, the irony that you have created. You are protecting your child from danger and you are dangerous. So for example, unless you watch them every second, you cannot protect them from lit cigarettes, or lighters lying around the house, or burns they you give them.

You have a lit cigarette and a child and you will risk burning their skin. You have a lit cigarette and a child in your arms and you can do more than just burn their skin. You can burn their hair, their eyelashes. You smoke with a child in the car and you put their health in danger. If a lighter you own is used by a small child, you are risking that the child will hurt themselves with it. Please do not allow yourself the nightmare that includes rushing a child to an emergency room with third degree burns. You might not survive the incident.

If you have children and you smoke, it would behoove you think twice about smoking. It is a situation that courts tragedy. To do that to an innocent child is, hopefully, unthinkable to you

It is possible for you to stop being the possible cause of their pain