When I was a kid, my parents did that all the time. It would burn our eyes. Having the window open doesn’t make matters very much better to be honest. It’s inconsiderate, and I think that if I did it to a kid, it would be abusive because I know how uncomfortable it can make a kid to have burning eyes and no fresh air to breathe. I do remember they would have parties and we would go outside in the cold to get fresh air! Our eyes would BURN! So if I would do the same to a kid, knowing full well how it feels, I would say that’s pretty abusive. But like I say, some older people might not be conscious of how it feels. In which case I think it’s ignorant but not abusive.
Pinching someone doesn’t do any physical harm but if you sat and pinched a kid on the ass even though she told you it hurts, we’d call it abuse right? So I am with you that it is abusive if you know that smoke is hurting the kid’s eyes or making them cough but you don’t give her the fresh air.
Smokers are pretty oblivious to the effects their smoking has on others. If the little kids were coughing granny probably figured they had colds or the weather outside was too cold, hence why she must keep the windows rolled up to protect them from getting sick.
We had a woman come in with an asthmatic cat, she and the cat reaked of cigarette smoke. As soon as we took the cat away and put it in an oxygen cage it was much better. The woman was an RN, she smoked constantly around the cat, then the cat has an asthma attack and she gets in the car with it and has another cigarette on the way to the animal hospital! It was okay though because she had the a/c on. :rolleyes: Then she tells our vet that she can’t understand why the cat keeps having the asthma attacks.
So, is it abuse in the usual definition of the word? No. Stupidity and selfishness? Yes.
Wow, I’m a smoker and I can’t imagine smoking in my car with the windows rolled up. Egads, how could she see to drive?!
That’s a pretty broad brush you got there, friend; how do manage to lift it?
I have been a smoker in my life, though not for the last several years. I find it extremely difficult to believe that in this day and age, when nearly every indoor public space in the U.S. is an officially designated “no smoking” area, when even certain outdoor areas where people congregate (like stadiums) restrict smoking to designated areas or forbid it altogether, when there’s a steady stream of court judgments against tobacco companies for hundreds of millions of dollars, and news stories about the effects of second-hand smoke are common as dirt, any person who smokes could possibly be “oblivious” to the effects their smoking has on others. “Dismissive”, perhaps, or “in denial” possibly, but not “oblivious”. I was always quite aware of the effect my smoking had on other people and went out of my way to minimize it, except in enviroments where my lighting up or not was going to make no difference to the overall air quality (bars, etc.). Heck, even outdoors I’ve been known to put out a cigarette or move to a less desirable location if a non-smoker moved into range and obviously had little choice about where to be – at a bus stop, or waiting at the door of a building, etc. Generally, my rule of thumb was that if someone had a choice about whether to be near me and my smoke, and chose to anyway, that was their problem, but if there were any reason to think that they were forced to be where I was, I would move away or put it out. I certainly never deliberately lit up in any confined area where kids would have to breathe it – I have too many bad memories of being shut up in the family car in the winter with my dad puffing away on his pipe to subject a kid to that. That’s the key to this situation for me – the kids in the car probably have no choice whatever about whether to be there. Adults at least could tell granny to stop and let them out, but the kids most likely don’t have that option.
About that, we agree. I really can’t believe, even having been a smoker, that there are people who are so selfish that they can’t forgo having a cigarette for the duration of a car ride with non-smokers, when there are so many other situations in the world that require longer periods of self-denial. That the non-smokers in this case are kids who don’t really have a choice about riding with the smoker makes it that much worse – unfathomable, to me. But I don’t think it meets the standard for criminally actionable child abuse.
These two examples are so amazingly different that it’s almost stunning they can exist on the same page. There’s simply no way having one car ride where the driver smokes one cigarette can hurt those kids, unless, as has been stated, they’re asthmatics or somesuch, in which case their reactions to the smoke probably would’ve been different. (Well, none were mentioned, which I assume means there were none.) Letting kids crawl around unbuckled puts them in danger of flying through the windshield and killing themselves. Flying through the fucking windshield! It’s absolutely boggling to try to put this on the same level as being exposed to cigarette smoke for 20 minutes.
Was it inconsiderate for that woman to light up in that situation? Yes. Was it wrong? Yes. Are the kids going to be messed up in any way because of it? Most likely not. Is it abuse? Hell, no.
No.