Nearly a third of kids aged 9-12 who start smoking do so because they saw movies in which characters smoked, according to new research on movies, children, and smoking.

According to HealthDay News, a recent study in Pediatrics magazine found that young people who start smoking may have been influenced by movies they saw in early childhood, with almost almost 80 percent of the exposure to smoking scenes in movies coming from films rated “G,” “PG” and “PG-13.”

“Movies seen at the youngest ages had as much influence over later smoking behavior as the movies that children had seen recently,” said study author Linda Titus-Ernstoff, a pediatrics professor at Dartmouth Medical School.

“It is quite improbable that the association we see is due to some other influence, some other characteristic inherent in children or parental behavior. The relationship is clearly between movie-smoking and smoking initiation,” Titus-Ernstoff said.

Titus-Ernstoff and colleagues studied more than 2,200 kids aged 9-12 in New Hampshire and Vermont to determine the impact of movie smoking on young people.

Every year for three years, starting in 2002, the kids got a yearly list of 50 recent, popular films including 102 Dalmatians, George of the Jungle, Muppets from Space, The Perfect Storm, Chicago, and Fight Club.

On average, the kids claimed to have seen about a third of the films, which translates into seeing on-screen smoking 150 times during the three-year period.  Each year during the study, the kids also reported how many cigarettes they had ever smoked. Even a few puffs counted. 

Kids who saw smoking more often in movies were more likely to smoke cigarettes themselves. That finding held despite other factors, including parental smoking and strictness.  Younger kids were also influenced by seeing smoking in the movies, the study shows.

Titus-Ernstoffto assess the tobacco content in movies (and other content) by visiting web sites such as http://www.screenit.com or http://www.kids-in-mind.com.