Young Children Minds

Smokers nowadays can not just light their cigarettes in public places such as restaurants, shopping malls, office buildings, etc. Because of the health related problems that even a non-smokers or passive smokers can pick up when they are in the same room with the smokers, many governments including in Indonesia set regulation that ban smoking in public places. Some airports, office buildings, restaurants, and shopping malls provide glass insulated corners for smokers to continue having their smoking needs.

I am neither going to talk about the danger and health consequences of cigarettes smoking nor to elaborate on how to prevent people from it because so many publications are available for us to read. I just want to share a short discussion that took place at one McDonald’s outlet - Alam Sutera – under a bit cloudy sky on Sunday morning directly from Church we went there for breakfast.

At the corner, there is an open space with tables and chairs for smoking restaurant guests where glass partitions separate it with the inside air-conditioned dining room. Next to that outside smoking section is a children playground and I saw only two kids played there at that time. I said to my wife, how come they put the children playground next to the free smoking section. Isn’t it more considerate to choose other corner so that the children will not see the adults and some young adults smoking while having breakfast, I asserted as I think as adults that the situation could make children think that it is okay to smoke cigarettes as they become used to what they often see. To my surprise, our seventh grade eleven-year old daughter commented that children most probably do not observe the situation just described by me when they find a playing ground and the children will immediately just having fun there.

Taking the comment from my daughter, I think that there were so many similar situations like this where we as adults always push our own perspective in making decisions for our loved ones in so many other important things in life without considering the way our children think; the way so many years ago we as small kids thought as well. What do you think?

Hopefully this short article will inspire you readers to adopt a habit that in a way consider other people’s including young people point of view. It will help enrich our life in family and home as well as in the social and cultural, two areas that are equally important as the other four – physical and health, financial and career, mental and educational, spiritual and ethical, as defined by Paul J. Meyer, founder of Success Motivation International, Inc., in his amazing Total Person® and Wheel of Life® concepts. For more information about SMI, please visit www.success-motivation.com

7/12/2010

Husen Suprawinata

e-mail to hwinata@success-motivation.com

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