If pregnant women stop smoking, babies are happier

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mothers who stop smoking while pregnant tend to have cheerier, more adaptable babies, British researchers reported on Wednesday.

Babies of women who continued to smoke while pregnant were notably grumpy, and the researchers believe that mothers who can muster the effort to kick the habit are also caring more for their babies in other ways.

Babies of non-smokers also are more temperamental than babies born to quitters, the researchers found -- which they said suggested that mothers who suspend smoking are doing something special.

Tobacco can affect the growth of a fetus and has been shown to also affect children if they breathe in their mothers' secondhand smoke.

But Dr. Kate Pickett at Britain's University of York thinks her team is on to something more. They have been following 18,000 British babies born between 2000 and 2002, as well as their mothers, who are taking part in a larger study.

They asked the mothers a number of questions about their babies' temperaments.

"There are things like whether or not a child is receptive to new things, whether they are frightened of strangers, whether their mood is cheerful or not," Pickett said in a telephone interview.

The mothers were classified as heavy or light smokers, never-smokers or quitters. The women who quit had noticeably more easygoing babies, Pickett and colleagues reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.