I was 14 years old when I was first offered a cigarette. It was during a school ski trip in the French Alps. I took a drag in the cable car on the way up the mountain, thought it was horrible and never touched a cigarette again. I told my Mum about it when I got home. I think, being a realist who had been a social smoker herself growing up in the '60s, she'd accepted that I would try smoking at some point but would hopefully find it too unpleasant to continue. Luckily she was right!

The digital age has its benefits and there is certainly an argument that some social media use is positive. However, what concerns me are platforms like TikTok and Instagram advertising and pushing vaping as a cool, almost healthy normal activity. It has become a big problem in New Zealand schools. Online vape sellers boast of no ID verification and even offer "discreet packaging" disguising vapes among things like beauty products to help teens hide them from their parents. I shouldn't be shocked. After all, social media, like the internet, simply provides a new forum for the kind of behaviours that have long been normal behaviour. Growing up, there was always someone with a big sister who knew someone who knew someone happy to buy you whatever you wanted. Is it any worse if similar things are happening online now instead?

When I was growing up, my parents generally knew where I was at any given time, who I was with and what I was doing. Today, when our children are online in their bedroom, do we know what they are looking at? Do we always know whom they are talking to? Or do we assume they are safe simply because they're at home? Vaping companies are not stupid, they know that our tamariki provide a vast market for their products. All the more frustrating, when you consider the positive strides taken towards making tobacco and cigarettes less accessible and aspirational. Indeed, the percentage of 15-year-old smokers in New Zealand has fallen from 14% in 2007 to 1.4% in 2021, according to smokefree.org.nz. While these smoking statistics are encouraging, unfortunately vaping is promoted as less harmful than cigarettes whereas, in reality, vaping is very harmful to our young people. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control warns vaping is "unsafe for children, teens, and young adults"; and that nicotine is highly addictive and can harm adolescent brain development, which continues into the early to mid-20s.

So while New Zealand’s smoke-free objective for 2025 is admirable, I contend that we are facing a vaping time-bomb among our children, fuelled by a dangerously unregulated promotion of vapes on a variety of digital platforms that most parents have no idea about. The problem with screens and platforms like TikTok is it's easy to grow complacent about our children's use of them because it can make our own lives so much easier when they are seemingly innocently engaged. The vaping time bomb that social media may have in store for our tamariki should serve as a warning of the harms that lurk in the dark corners of these popular sites.