I recently read an interesting article about how a parent's smoking may affect child custody. Smokers losing custody cases a growing trend, by Myra Fleischer, The Washington Times. According to the article, "states are increasingly factoring cigarette smoking in making decisions about who gets custody of minor children. An anti-tobacco advocacy group surveyed custody cases involving smoking found that many courts have issued orders prohibiting smoking in the presence of a child, or even within 24 hours before a child arrives in the home. The survey further found that no court has ever ruled that subjecting a child to tobacco smoke should be ignored in deciding custody.
In Georgia specifically, custody is awarded according to the best interest of the child standard, and the court can consider any factor in making that decision. Thus, it is well within the confines of Georgia law for a judge to consider smoking as a factor in determining custody. According to the article, there was a Georgia custody modification case in which the mother was addicting to smoking and, after the divorce, her child was found to have asthma. In reaching its decision, the Georgia court "found that the mother was smoking in the presence of her child, which it said implied that she had insufficient concern for her child." This reason alone was enough to change custody.
This article further shows how anything and everything can come into play in a custody battle, especially if the parent is engaging in an activity that is harmful to the child. If you are a smoker and going through a custody fight, and are unable to break the habit, at the very least you should not smoke in the presence of the children or allow others to do so.