I think that all parents need to sit down with thier children and have a chat about the dangers of smoking. They need to know that there will be peer preasure at some point in their lives, and how difficult it truly is to quit. We are living in a day and age that there shouldn’t ever be any new smokers. Yet saddly there are more and more kids getting addicted and are thus foeced in a situation that is extremely difficult to fix.
The responsibility lies on the parents to make sure their children don’t start. Period. Yes there will be peer presure, but as a parent we need to know who are kids friends are, who they will be associating with and what temptations they will be faced with. When looking into a Yeshiva, one of the early questions should be about what the yeshiva’s policy is about smoking. Plus, never let your kids smoke on purim. I never understood why this has been an acceptable minhag in some places which has nothing to do with the spirit of Yom Tov.
Being the child of parents who “use” to smoke and now working with a brother who we are getting to stop smoking I see first hand of the importance to stop the tmeptation even before it begins.