By Diana
What do you think of when you hear (or read) “anti-tobacco video”?
Personally, I thought of those boring, repetitive videos shown in health classes. Every year, it’s the exact same thing: outdated and scripted videos featuring struggling actors, bad music, flashy colors and facts about tobacco flying across the TV screen. By the time kids reach high school, many of these videos, if not all, become predictable and ineffective.
So when Teen Weekend editor Diane Bitting asked me to come in and preview an anti-tobacco video, I wasn’t too excited. It turns out, however, that the video is a lot better than I expected.
In “A Talk with Your Kids about Smoking,” anti-tobacco lobbyist Patrick Reynolds addresses a large, teenage audience about smoking and tobacco.
Interestingly enough, Patrick Reynolds is actually the grandson of R.J. Reynolds, a tobacco giant whose name is printed on the boxes of products such as Camel, Kool and Pall Mall. The fact that he is the grandson of a tobacco giant and is speaking against tobacco makes for an interesting perspective.
Rather than bombarding then teens with facts about why tobacco is bad, Reynolds tells them personal stories about how it negatively affected peoples’ lives – including his own. He talked about how he had never met his father when he was younger and how he finally got the chance to meet him, but only to watch him die from the very thing that made his family wealthy.
I liked the video because it was straight forward and not gimmicky. The personal stories were certainly more interesting than blatant facts, although there were a couple. For teens that don’t have the attention span to listen to a lecture, the video is broken up with funny (but sometimes serious) anti-tobacco commercials. I think it’s a video worth watching – at least more than those shown in health class.
Read Diane Bitting’s article about “A Talk with Your Kids about Smoking” in today’s Teen Weekend section of the Lancaster New Era.
