If you are a smoker, you may justify your smoking habit by thinking that you are only hurting yourself. After all, you have made the choice to smoke, opening yourself up to numerous smoking related diseases, but you are not forcing those you love to do the same. If you have ever thought about trying to quit smoking, do so now. Your family loves and needs you, and your smoking habit is going to take you from them sooner rather than later.

How Smoking Affects You

Cigarette smoking may have seemed harmless when you first started, but chances are you now know about the many diseases that affect male smokers and female smokers alike. Lung cancer, emphysema, bladder infections, and other kinds of cancer are all linked to smoking. Every time you smoke a cigarette, you are hammering a nail into your coffin.

Besides this, smoking affects you as a person. You begin to smell like smoke, no matter how careful you are about your smoking habit. Your teeth and fingers will be stained by tobacco as well. Your overall appearance will change with time, and your family will have to watch this transformation happen in front of them.

How Smoking Affects Your Family

While you may have told yourself that your smoking habit only affects you, this is simply not true. Your smoking habit affects everyone in your family, even the nonsmokers. Your spouse and your children are exposed to secondhand smoke every single day. While not as dangerous as smoking directly, secondhand smoke can cause all of the same conditions that direct smoking causes. Imagine learning that your precious child has developed lung cancer because you exposed her to secondhand smoke. This is entirely possible.

According to the American Lung Association, secondhand smoke is responsible for 3,400 lung cancer deaths each year in adults who are nonsmokers. As many as 300,000 children develop dangerous lower respiratory tract infections because of secondhand smoke inhalation each year. Secondhand smoke can even kill children. Each year over 400 babies die of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) due to exposure to secondhand smoke. By smoking near your children, you could be killing them.

How Smoking Affects Your Family's Budget

Have you been wondering how you will pay for your children's college education? If you quit smoking, you may be able to see this possibility. Smoking has a huge effect on your family's budget, draining funds that you could use to support the family you love so much.

Depending on where you live, the cost for a pack of cigarettes is probably around $4.00. If you are smoking one pack per day, which is fairly common, you are spending $1500 a year on your cigarette smoking habit. Imagine how much money that would be if you could invest that same $1500 in a college fund for the next 18 years.

You need to quit smoking for the family who loves you. By smoking, you are slowly killing yourself, robbing your children of a parent and your spouse of a lover. You are also putting your children in danger, and could potentially kill them. To top off all of these dangers, you are draining needed funds from your family's budget. While it is not easy to quit smoking, you need to do so, because your smoking habit is destroying your family!