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Good job! The difference between embarrassment and letting your kids smoke, drink, and do drugs, is that your kids won't die from embarrassment. We aren't here to be their "buddies", we are here to be their parents. Embarrassment isn't abuse, it doesn't cause trauma and it definitely won't kill you.

It's a good thing to establish rules of behavior in a household, and there is nothing wrong with requiring unemancipated minors to uphold those rules. When they have moved out and are fully supporting themselves, they can make their own decisions and set the rules for their own households. This is simple common sense. Young people need direction, and if they're old enough to reject parental authority, they're old enough to pay their own freight.

What this mother is doing to stop her boys from smoking will certainly not hurt the boys, but my guess is that it probably won't change their behavior, either. She isn't risking destroying the relationship with them, because the relationship is already bad. They don't seem to respect her. If they did, then she wouldn't need the posters.

I'm curious: where is the father? Fathers can usually enforce discipline more effectively than mothers. No offense to mothers, it's just that boys, expecially at that age, need a strong male to model behavior and teach them respect for the rules of the house.

She has accomplished a couple of things: She has virtually assured that her boys will smoke, and heavily, especially when they are around friends. She has also alienated her boys, evaporating whatever credibility she may have had left. They now know that they cannot trust her not to fly off the handle in the future.

The posters are silly and useless and will be seen that way by everybody in town. They virtually scream "Hey look at me! I'm an incompetent parent! I do stupid things to my kids!".

The truly delusional part of it is that she probably actually thinks that townsfolk will bother to actually call the police if they see the kids smoking, and that if they did, the police would actually do anything about it.