Parents who smoke and drink and otherwise fail to take care of their health are influencing their children to do likewise - but they may also be somehow giving them the nod to have sex, researchers said recently.

Teen-agers whose parents smoked were about 50 per cent more likely to have had sex by the time they were 15, the researchers reported.

"Adolescents whose parents engage in risky behaviour, especially smoking, are especially likely to be sexually active," Esther Wilder of Lehman College in New York and Toni Terling Watt of Southwest Texas State University wrote in their report.

"They are also more likely to smoke, drink, associate with substance-using peers and participate in delinquent activity," the report, published in the health affairs journal Milbank Quarterly, concluded.

"Because parents serve as important role models for their children, it stands to reason that parents who exhibit unsafe behaviours are especially likely to have children with similar tendencies," Wilder and Watt wrote.

Experts have long told parents that children will act on what they see parents do, not what they are told, but the survey found some surprising cause-and-effect links.

It is found that boys were more likely to have sex if their parents failed to use seatbelts - but not girls.

Basically, the parents are teaching by example that risk-taking is desirable. "If parents engage in risky behavior, it sets up a chain of events that encourages other kinds of risky behaviour as well," Wilder said.

The survey found what other experts have said - that close supervision of teens makes them behave more safely. This means being at home when they come home from school, being at home with them in the evening and asking them about their activities.

(Xinhua News Agency September 7, 2002)