The Effects of Parental Health Shocks on Adult Offspring Smoking Behavior and Self‐Assessed Health

An important avenue for smoking deterrence may be through familial ties if adult smokers respond to parental health shocks. In this paper, we merge the Original Cohort and the Offspring Cohort of the Framingham Heart Study to study how adult offspring smoking behavior and subjective health assessments vary with elder parent smoking behavior and health outcomes. These data allow us to model the smoking behavior of adult offspring over a 30‐year period contemporaneously with parental behaviors and outcomes. We find strong ‘like father, like son’ and ‘like mother, like daughter’ correlations in smoking behavior. We find that adult offspring significantly curtail their own smoking following an own health shock; however, we find limited evidence that offspring smoking behavior is sensitive to parent health, with the notable exception that women significantly reduce both their smoking participation and intensity following a smoking‐related cardiovascular event of a parent. We also model the subjective health assessment of adult offspring as a function of parent health, and we find that women report significantly worse health following the smoking‐related death of a parent. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.