Kids These Days by Angus Bohanon

I wish I could tell you that this photograph is fake, but I can’t. This is a picture of a boy in Indonesia named Aldi. He is two years old and tips the scales at 44 pounds, twice what a toddler his age should weigh. And as you can see, he’s a smoker.

By now I hope you’re incredulous. I hope you’re saddened. Come to think of it, I hope you’re angry. How, you wonder, and why? Allow me to explain.

According to his mother, Diana—many Indonesians only go by one name—Aldi has always loved smoke. “I don’t remember when,” she told CNN, “but we went to the market and then suddenly he had a cigarette in his hand. Even when he was a baby and he would smell smoke he would be happy.”

Seto Mulyadi, chairman of Indonesia’s National Commission for Child Protection, blames the cultural stigma of smoking, or rather lack thereof, for Aldi’s habit. In Indonesia, apparently, there is almost no public knowledge of the toxicity of the smoke that so many residents willingly suck down. Aldi’s mother smoked all the way through her pregnancy, only quitting when she gave birth, and it is a common sight to see a parent with a baby in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

In fact, the main reason that Diana wants Aldi to quit smoking has nothing to do with his health—Diana simply doesn’t know how fragile his health is or how devastating the tobacco is for him—she just doesn’t want to pay for it anymore. Aldi smokes 40 cigarettes a day at a cost of almost four dollars, a crippling expense in a country whose average per capita income hovers around $2000.

But what’s to be done? The simple answer, I suppose, is simply not to let the chubby little chimney smoke, but Aldi is prone to tantrums that pose a serious threat to his own safety when he’s kept from his precious cigarettes. In hindsight, his mother should have just yanked his first cigarette out of his hand and stomped it into the dirt, but it’s far too late for that now. The only glimmer of hope is that, as belligerent as he may be, Aldi’s two. Just take them away. And if he doesn’t like it, well . . . tough. It’s for his own good.