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How Do I Know If My Teen is Vaping?

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Quick answer: To determine if your teen is vaping, you can learn the signs of nicotine withdrawal, watch for new behavior such as being secretive about personal belongings, watch for new items in their room that resemble flash drives or pens but aren’t, and pay attention to any coughs or chest congestion unrelated to illness or allergies: all these may be signs your teen is vaping.

Key Points:

  • Rates of teen vaping have dropped dramatically since the passage of stronger regulations around marketing and selling nicotine vape products to minors.
  • Teens need to know that nicotine, the active ingredient in vape products, is a highly addictive drug
  • Teens need to know that chronic nicotine use can impair brain development and have a negative impact on attention and impulse control
  • Studies show teen vaping is associated with cigarette smoking in adulthood
  • Studies show teens who vape nicotine are at increased risk of drinking alcohol

Teen Vaping and Health: There is No Safe Vaping

If you’re the parent of a teen, one thing you need to understand is that teen vaping – which peaked around 2019, before federal authorities instituted rules about selling flavored vape products, a rule recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court – is common among students in middle school and high school in the U.S.

To begin our discussion of this topic, we’ll make sure we’re all on the same page with the basic terms we’ll use, starting with what we mean by vaping. Here’s a clear definition of vaping from The Child Mind Institute :

“Vaping is the act of inhaling and exhaling the vapor produced by the heated nicotine liquid of an electronic cigarette, vape pen, or personal vaporizer.”

Vape products that contain THC – the psychoactive component in cannabis/marijuana – are also common, but in this article, we’ll focus on teen vaping of nicotine products.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicate vape products may appear in forms, and resemble:

  • Traditional cigarettes
  • Cigars
  • Pipes
  • Regular pens or pencils used for writing
  • USB memory sticks

Regardless of their external appearance, almost all vape products include four components:

  • Cartridge/pod/container/reservoir filled with a liquid containing nicotine
  • Heating element, called an atomizer
  • Power source, most often a small battery
  • Mouthpiece, which may or may not resemble the inhaling end of a pipe/cigarette

Those are the most basic facts about vape devices. Next, we’ll share the prevalence of vaping among teens in the U.S., the health risks associated with vaping, the signs your teen may be vaping, and the signs of nicotine withdrawal.

First, we need to make something perfectly clear:

While vaping is less harmful than smoking tobacco in the traditional manner, there is nothing healthy about exposing human lungs to super-heated vapor. In other words:
VAPING IS NOT A HEALTHY HABIT FOR TEENS OR ANYONE ELSE.

With that said – and hopefully heard and understood – we’ll share the latest prevalence data on teen vaping in the U.S.

Teen Vaping: Facts and Figures

We collected the following data from the 2024 Monitoring the Future Survey  (MTF 2024). The MTF is an annual, nationwide study that surveys over 50,000 middle school, high school, college students and young adults each year about their drug and alcohol use. The sample size and consistency of the MTF enables policymakers and providers to reach population-level conclusions and make reliable generalizations about the prevalence of drug, alcohol, and tobacco use.

Here’s the data from the 2024 MTF on overall tobacco use and vaping among middle school and high school students:

Monitoring the Future 2024: Tobacco Use and Vaping Among High School Students

Any Tobacco Use:
  • 8th graders: 5.4%
  • 10th graders: 11.3%
  • 12th graders: 16.3%
Past-Year Vaping:
  • 8th graders: 9.6%
  • 10th graders: 15.4%
  • 12th graders: 21.0%
Past 30-day Vaping:
  • 8th graders: 5.7%
  • 10th graders: 9.8%
  • 12th graders: 15.0%
Daily Vaping:
  • 8th graders: 0.8%
  • 10th graders: 2.7%
  • 12th graders: 5.2%

Those results align with studies on tobacco use and vaping among high school students published by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS). While the prevalence is high, those numbers represent a significant decrease from pre-regulations levels in 2019, when over 1/3rd of high school seniors reported any tobacco use.  That’s good news about a bad situation. And yes, the current prevalence of teen tobacco use and vaping is a bad situation.

Now let’s look at data from the CDC, which includes information from students in middle school as well as high school:

  • Among students who ever vaped:
    • Current use: 43.6%
    • Want to quit: 63.9%
  • Among students who report current use:
    • Vaped 20 of past 30 days: 38.4%
    • Vape every day: 26.3%
  • Among students who currently vape:
    • Use disposable products: 55.6%
    • Use prefilled or refillable pods/cartidges:15.6%
    • Other systems: 7.0%
    • Most common brands: Elf Bar, Esco Bars, Vuse, and JUUL

To put those numbers in perspective we’ll translate the percentage of high school seniors who vaped in the past month to a number. Among the estimated three million high school seniors in the U.S., around half a million report past month vaping. That’s far too many – and that’s what we mean when we say teen vaping in the U.S. is a bad situation.

Next, we’ll look at the health risks associated with vaping tobacco/nicotine products.

Teen Vaping: Negative Consequences for Physical Health

Data from the CDC show that vaping tobacco/nicotine products can result in serious, long-term health problems.

Health Risks of Vaping Tobacco/Nicotine

  • Vapes contain the drug nicotine
  • Nicotine is highly addictive.
  • Nicotine impairs healthy brain development
  • Young people are at increased vulnerability to nicotine addiction, which can occur before daily use begins
  • Nicotine use during adolescence has a negative impact on areas of the brain that control:
    • Attention
    • Learning
    • Mood
    • Impulsivity
  • Nicotine use can increase risk of addiction to other substances
  • Vaping/nicotine use during adolescence increase risk of smoking cigarettes during adulthood

In addition to the health risks of nicotine, the following health risks are associated with vaping:

  • The liquid in vapes may include cancer-causing chemicals, including heavy metals such as:
    • Nickel, tin, and lead
  • The liquid in vapes may include other volatile organic compounds
  • Flavored vapes may contain diacetyl, linked to a serious lung disease called obliterative bronchiolitis, a.k.a. popcorn lung – see research from Harvard University on the topic here.

Next, let’s look at the signs your teen may be vaping.

Teen Vaping: What to Look For

We adapted this list from helpful information provided by Dayton Children’s Hospital in Dayton, Ohio. Parents who are concerned their teen may be vaping should watch for the following:

Signs of Teen Vaping

  • Always thirsty: vaping dries out the mouth and leads to overall dehydration
  • Loss of taste: vaping desensitizes taste buds, which means if your teen complains their food is bland, or starts using far more salt/pepper/spices that usual, they may have started vaping
  • Nosebleeds: vaping can dry out mucosal tissue, which can cause nosebleeds
  • Acne: sudden breakouts – particularly in a teen with no previous acne – can be a sign your teen is vaping
  • Chest/breathing/lung problems: vaping can damage lung tissue, which can lead to symptom similar to bronchitis/pneumonia
  • Mood swings/anxious behavior: nicotine can increase energy, while nicotine withdrawal can increase anxiety and irritability, which means swings from high to low energy, as well as periods of anxiety/irritability, can be signs your teen is vaping
  • Secretive behavior/more time away from home: if your teen vapes, they probably don’t want you to know, and may engage in uncharacteristic furtive or sneaky behavior.
  • Money: if your teen suddenly needs more money, it may be a sign they’re spending all their allowance, or money from part-time jobs, on vaping
  • New items around room: the presence of small devices that look like pens or liquid-filled cartridges and/or chargers they don’t use for phones may be a sign your teen is vaping

Please keep in mind that when seen alone, one at a time, these signs may be completely unrelated to vaping: a teen with a cough may just have a chest cold, and an irritable teen with a cough may simply be an irritable teen with a chest cold. However, if the cough appears alongside irritability, secretive behavior, a sudden lack of money, and the appearance of questionable looking flash drives or chargers in their room or belongings, then those may indeed be signs your teen is vaping.

Since the primary active ingredient in vape devices is nicotine, teens who begin vaping, become addicted, and then lose access to vape devices and nicotine may enter nicotine withdrawal. To identify a teen in nicotine withdrawal, parents can watch for the following signs:

CDC: Signs of Nicotine Withdrawal

  1. Intense, constant craving for nicotine
  2. Irritability/anger
  3. Restlessness/jumpiness
  4. Anxiety
  5. Sadness/depressed mood
  6. Difficulty concentrating
  7. Problems falling asleep
  8. Constant hunger
  9. Weight gain

 

Again, keep perspective when looking for signs of vaping in your teen. One sign alone may be meaningless, while several signs simultaneously, viewed with an understanding of context, personality, and situation, may mean your teen is in nicotine withdrawal, and may have started vaping.

We’ll close this article with advice from the CDC on how to prevent – or decrease the likelihood – that your teen will vape nicotine.

How to Protect and/or Prevent Your Children and Teens From Vaping

We’ll take a moment to explain what we mean by context, above, in terms of the signs of nicotine withdrawal. A close look shows the signs of nicotine withdrawal overlap with some symptoms of anxiety, depression, and ADHD. Therefore, it’s important to understand your child, their habits, and the context in which you see the signs: consider the big picture and talk to your child before you assume they’re vaping – because what you see may be caused by something else.

With that said, the CDC indicates there are four groups of people who can play a significant role in preventing or reducing teen vaping:

1. Parents and caregivers can:
  • Learn and share the facts about vaping. Download this Vaping Fact Sheet and review the content with kids
  • Lead by example, and refrain from vaping or endorsing vaping.
  • Reinforce the message that no matter what they hear from peers or companies who sell and market vapes:

Vaping is Bad for Their Health

2. Educators can:
  • Participate in vape and tobacco education initiatives a school
  • Share information on the health dangers of vaping, using this fact sheet as a guide.
  • Lead by example, and refrain from vaping or endorsing vaping.
3. Healthcare providers can:
  • Learn the facts about teen vaping, using this fact sheet as a guide
  • Screen adolescents for tobacco use.
  • Consider these treatment guidelines published by the American Psychological Association (APA)
  • Encourage teens not to vape, and if they do, encourage them to quit, using this resource or by calling 1-800-QUIT-NOW
4. Local, state, and federal authorities can:
  • Implement vape-free policies in public spaces
  • Increase cost of vape products
  • Increase taxation on vape products
  • Require businesses to obtain a license to sell tobacco products

If all four groups send youth and teens a unified message on the dangers of vaping – including the fact that one vape cartridge can contain as much nicotine as an entire pack of 20 traditional cigarettes – then our youth and teens will know the facts and – hopefully – make a healthy choice.

Resources for Stopping Vaping: Quitters Win

 We encourage parents, educators, and healthcare providers concerned about teen vaping to take advantage of the following online resources:

Written By:

Angus Whyte

Angus Whyte has an extensive background in neuroscience, behavioral health, adolescent development, and mindfulness, including lab work in behavioral neurobiology and a decade of writing articles on mental health and mental health treatment. In addition, Angus brings twenty years of experience as a yoga teacher and experiential educator to his work for BACA. He’s an expert at synthesizing complex concepts into accessible content that helps patients, providers, and families understand the nuances of mental health treatment, with the ultimate goal of improving outcomes and quality of life for all stakeholders.

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