Seeing him rest on the steering wheel of his toy truck, smoking a cigarette, you might think he’s a truck driver stuck in the body of a toddler, but Ardi Rizal is really just a two-year-old boy who loves to smoke.
The 56-pound toddler, from Indonesia’s South Sumatra province, smokes 2 packs of cigarettes a day and sits on his toy truck all day long. There’s hardly ever a moment in the day when Ardi isn’t puffing away on a cigarette, and that’s the main reason why he can hardly move by himself anymore, let alone run along and play with other children.
His mother has desperately forced the toddler to quit, but he always got so angry that he started screaming and banging h
is head against the walls, saying quitting makes him dizzy and sick. He also asks for a specific brand of cigarettes, that costs his family $5.50 a day. While his mother is set on somehow getting Ardi to quit, his father says: ‘He looks pretty healthy to me, I don’t see the problem.’ Now, this is what I call a ‘great’ parent.
Although authorities have even offered the Ardi Rizal’s parents a brand new car, if they convince him to stop smoking, the
parents don’t dare ask him anymore.
