A mum who let her 13-year-old son smoke up to 30 cigarettes a day explained why she thought he had to do it.
Among the many documentaries filmed in the UK in the noughties was the Channel 4 fare Child Chain Smoker, which looked at the life of 13-year-old boy Joel Parker.
He’d only just become a teenager but had been smoking for years, and would sometimes light up as many as 30 times a day.
In the 2007 documentary, he claimed nicotine had no effect on him at all, saying it just calmed him down and that he felt ‘more refreshed’ when he had a cigarette.
Joel compared it to feeling thirsty and having a drink – having that need and then quenching it.
13-year-old Joel had been smoking for years by the time the documentary crew met him. (Channel 4)
His mum Pam said she ‘don’t want him to smoke for various reasons’, saying it’d be harmful to him in all sorts of ways and that she’d ‘already tried to get him to stop’ but her son’s smoking ‘doesn’t seem to bother me health wise’.
Child Chain Smoker showed various attempts to get him to stop, including totting up the cost of his smoking habit in the hundreds of pounds and showing him the lungs of a regular smoker.
In the documentary, he was also given nicotine patches, and then immediately went out for a cigarette anyway.
The kid told documentary filmmaker, James Routh, ‘let’s drop the camera for a bit’ before agreeing that he was worried about some of the concerns that had been raised with him.
Elsewhere in the documentary, Joel explained that he’d been peer pressured into taking up smoking and didn’t like it on his first two attempts.
However, when he tried it for a third time he ‘just started smoking’ and had carried on for years.
His mum said she’d tried to get her son to stop (Channel 4)
Even though she was against it and had tried to get him to stop, his mum explained why she hadn’t banned her son from smoking.
His mum said: “You’ve got to fit in round here, an outsider wouldn’t fit in, and to fit in you’ve got to be this tough sort of person.
“That’s how the kids are being brought up now. I know Joel away from this place would be a different child, a very different child.”
She added that she’d ‘rather him be in the house’, saying that she allowed him to smoke in the house because she knew he went outside for cigarettes, but said it was ‘the worst thing I ever done’.
His mum would promise him money in exchange for him not going out on the streets.
At the end of Child Chain Smoker, Pam had tried unsuccessfully to get rid of her own smoking habit, while Joel said he didn’t want to quit and ‘no one can make me quit’.