Junior Nags : Kids are all over their parents to quit killing themselves with cigarettes. The pressure is on for adults to do as they say, report O.C. teachers and former smokers.

Craig Stubbs, a Westminster contractor, was a two-pack-a-day smoker, but he had no cigarette lighted when his young son walked into his office at home. “I would always try to hide smoking from him,” Stubbs recalls.

What happened next changed Stubbs’ life.

His son Ben, not yet 5 years old, asked for his father’s attention. When he was sure he had it, he spoke “with a genuine seriousness and a staunch resolve,” his father recalls.

It was a confrontation. “He said, ‘Quit smoking; it’s bad for you.’ He said smoking is incredibly damaging and I was not going to have the privilege of enjoying him if I kept this up.

“I was startled,” Stubbs says. “It was quite a shock.”

So what did Stubbs do?

“Well, I quit. Right then. I did not smoke again. I’d tried to quit several times before, but this time I didn’t go back.”

He felt guilty, says his wife, Ember. “He just felt terrible and had to quit. Ben is not a kid of many words, but what he does say means quite a lot.”

His father has been off tobacco for nearly eight years, but Ben Stubbs, now 12, is still worried about smoking. Last year he drew an anti-smoking poster that won a contest run by Orange County’s cancer, heart and lung associations. The design has been printed on 30,000 textbook covers that were distributed to all Orange County sixth-graders.

But Ben’s anti-smoking bent is hardly unique. He’s one of a generation of kids targeted years ago by anti-smoking forces to become the Smoke-Free Class of 2000. Each year since kindergarten, they have received anti-smoking lectures and materials in school to stiffen them against pressures to smoke during adolescence, the time when most smokers start.

Success or failure is still several years off, but the byproduct has already surfaced: a corps of youthful tobacco rangers taking the anti-smoking assault home.

Now for parents who smoke, the most feared question is not “How did the baby get in there?” It’s, “If smoking is bad for me, why do you do it?”

“Kids have always nagged their parents about this,” says Keith Pendell, a La Habra High School teacher who designs anti-smoking programs nationwide. “I used to hound my dad to quit. Then I started and he got on my case.

“But these kids now know the harmful effects of smoking more so then we did. We grew up with dancing cigarettes on TV. It wasn’t really a health issue.”

The effect of the tobacco rangers can be seen in smoking-cessation classes countywide. Adults seeking help for alcoholism or obesity rarely report pressure from their school-age children, authorities say. But between 50% and 75% of adults in no-smoking classes say they enrolled because their children pressured them, according to local instructors.

“These children are afraid they are going to be abandoned because of awareness of what tobacco is going to do to their parents,” Pendell says. “It’s a very important motivation for parents to quit.”

Some, such as Stubbs, throw in the towel immediately. “I only had one cigarette after that--a Salem. But I’d just been shot in a hunting accident.”

Others try to bob and weave and encounter a sometimes extraordinary persistence. “I’ve heard people say their kids hide their (parents’) cigarettes,” said Donna Gordon, a former smoker who conducts a quit-smoking class at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach. “My kids would break my cigarettes. That’s pretty common.”

Many parents say they’ll quit, then smoke outside the house, regardless of the weather, says Rita Freese of Orange, another no-smoking instructor. “They feel kind of stupid doing it, but they do it. They don’t want to smoke in front of their kids.”

In some instances, the reversal of roles is so complete that parents genuinely fear being caught smoking by their children.

“My wife smokes, OK?” says Jim, a respiratory therapist from Orange County who would rather not give his surname.

“And my son (age 14), little by little he starts getting really, really upset: ‘I can’t stand the smoke,’ ‘I know you’re smoking in the morning; I can smell it in my room,’ ‘You better quit; you’re gonna get cancer and die and leave me, and if I ever see you smoke another cigarette I’m gonna run away from home.’

“He’s genuinely upset. His grandfather died who he was really close to, and his grandmother died. And then his uncle died. Any more deaths in the family would be real, real hard for him to handle.

“So my wife would cough once in a while, and he’d say, ‘You’re coughing! You have cancer!’ She did have a chronic cough, and I was concerned about that. But you can’t tell your wife, ‘You can’t do that anymore.’ She’d just laugh. I didn’t say anything about it. I let him do it.”

And he did, relentlessly, Jim says. She would go outside and smoke, not out of consideration but because “she didn’t want any more (talk) from my son. She just basically got to the point where she had to quit.”

It has been hard but she has been successful so far, Jim says. Even so, “as soon as she comes home from work, he checks her out. He smells her breath.”

For harassed smoking parents, there is a dark side and a bright side to this, says Dr. Justin D. Call, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the UC Irvine College of Medicine.

The dark side: “There’s another group of kids afraid to bring up the subject, even though they’re upset. They don’t say a word. Their fear stems from embarrassing or depreciating their parents, because they’ve heard their parents depreciate these (anti-smoking) efforts.”

The bright side: “If your kid’s on your case, be happy he’s well-adjusted. The more mature parents should tell their children they’re glad to hear they understand, and they hope they never take up smoking because it’s certainly a burden on them. This does not destroy their authority with the child. Kids should be complimented for their sound judgment.”

What is at work, Call says, is genuine fear. Children begin talking about the concept of death as early as age 5, “but they don’t start understanding it until about 10 years of age. So around that time, when death has a sense of finality, they become quite concerned.”

Children talk about such things among themselves, Call says. But at this age, they think “categorically rather than theoretically. That is, they hear a single bad story about someone dying of cancer because of smoking, and that’s all the proof they need to become very concerned.”

As adolescents, about half of them will be capable of making fine distinctions, such as heavy smoking being more dangerous than occasional smoking. But until then, it’s simple:

Mommy + Cigarettes = Dead Mommy.

Added to this is the authority of the teacher, who is “their expert on the outside world.”

“It’s interesting. Children of doctors should realize their parents know more than their teachers about the human body and disease and procreation. But many of them don’t believe it until the teacher says so.”

So when the powerful smoking-is-dangerous message comes from such authority, it might as well be chiseled onto stone tablets.

Adele Quenzler, a volunteer for the local American Cancer Society unit, remembers lecturing a class of elementary school pupils in Garden Grove, “and they were so attentive and receptive. They were really alarmed and wanted more information: ‘What can we do? Where are the classes?’ They were not ill at ease with the subject at all.”

And so an assault on the evil habit that threatens their parents with death is a logical and natural result, Call says. With so much at stake in the children’s eyes, parents should not be surprised by their urgency and persistence.

“It’s not unhealthy to wage a persistent campaign at home about this. This is not a sign of neurotic difficulty in the child. The child is only objecting to what the parents are denying, the dangers of smoking.

“If he approaches in a reasonable, consistent and persistent way, you know his knowledge is sound and secure and also based in sympathy and understanding of addiction. You know that his thinking about the problem is really advanced. He understands something about the problem and the addiction.”

The irony is that often these tobacco rangers, after hectoring their parents into giving up the weed, begin smoking in adolescence.

“This is more complicated,” Call says. “There is a peer group to deal with. And smoking is a valuable asset for many adolescents who want to assert their independence in a purely symbolic way.”

Some adolescents may still be unable to visualize abstract issues. If so, they literally cannot imagine the bad effects of smoking applying to them until they actually happen. “They can smoke, but they can also deny that it affects them personally,” Call says. “They can disregard all the consequences for them. “ Some remain in this mode of thinking for life.

But until then, many are soldiers of the cause, and an amazing number are successful, says Sal Garcia, coordinator of tobacco education for the Garden Grove Unified School District.

“About the sixth grade, they’ve gotten the message, and they carry it to the parents for us. Kids get hard to deal with about then. That, plus they’re hassling you to quit smoking? Imagine it!”

Jim doesn’t have to imagine it. The smoke of battle between his son and wife has cleared, but the war apparently isn’t over. “He started hitting on us because he didn’t like the smell of coffee in the morning. I said, ‘Hey, too bad. Close your door, man, because that’s not gonna stop.’ What is this?”