ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the obvious need of children and adolescents for stability in their home environments, irrespective of how that environment is constructed. It presents the increasing body of evidence that family breakdown and reconstruction are major risk factors in terms of health-related behaviour. A strong motivation to pursue fun was an important predictor of smoking uptake. Smoking may be seen as a quite logical, developmental outcome for such adolescents which results from their adoption of what they perceive to be adult behaviour. Interventions and campaigns that assume a homogeneous 'youth culture' are thus fundamentally flawed. Despite the undoubted co-occurrence of cigarette smoking with other health-threatening behaviours, which has led to the compelling notion of a syndrome of 'problem behaviours', it is obvious that some of these activities are nevertheless a part of normal adult society. When considering smoking maintenance and cessation processes it is unwise wilfully to dismiss such psychophar-macological effects and the comfort provided by smoking as trivial.
