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In this work, we use a large national data set to explore how longer term socio-economic family and maternal as well as psychological antecedents predict both contemporary as well as longer term smoking behavior for a large sample of relatively high risk American youth. There are essentially two linked components to this research. First, we consider the relevance of longer term socio-economic and demographic prior characteristics as predictors of longer and shorter term smoking behavior. Then, controlling for this full range of priors, we explore issues which are of some interest, particularly to developmental and child psychologists; are there causal connections between childhood hyperactivity and adolescent smoking or is the often found connection spurious, in that it really reflects a likelihood that both hyperactivity and smoking behavior are intimately linked with other dimensions of child and adolescent behaviors? Additionally, to what extent does youthful smoking have an intergenerational connection independent of all the other potentially spurious factors which we are able to measure? The availability of long term maternal, family and behavioral trajectories for the NLSY youth and their families permit us to partially untangle competing hypotheses.