Why kids are vaping younger and younger, and what we can do
Tamar picked it up. It looked like a flash drive, the kind she used to download files when she had to use a different computer. Why would her son need a flash drive in camp? Then she looked at it more closely, and its true purpose became clear: This wasn’t a flash drive, but a vaping device. Moshe was 11 years old. What was this? Why would he be vaping?
Moshe isn’t a troubled kid, or a rebellious one. He’s simply part of a new trend of vaping among younger and younger kids. Baruch, a kollel yungerman, says that when he was a counselor in a camp five years ago, some eighth graders were thrown out for vaping. Two years later, in a different camp, the sixth graders were doing it. “It’s extremely common, and the age for doing it gets younger and younger,” says Rabbi Gross,* a mechanech in Lakewood. “It became the cool thing, the ‘in’ thing to do, and it’s easy to hide. The devices are small, and vaping doesn’t leave any traces — there’s no smell, or whatever smell there is goes away quickly.”
By comparison, Rabbi Gross says, cigarette smoking is much harder to hide. You have to go outside to smoke, and it leaves an odor on clothing and skin. Vaping, though, can be done anywhere. “The boys can vape behind a sefer in the beis medrash and no one will be the wiser,” he says.
How is it that younger and younger boys are vaping, not to mention the occasional teenage girl? How dangerous is it, and how alarmed should we be as a community? Finally, as parents and educators, what approach should we take in dealing with this trend?
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