Laura Dern is sharing how her job as a mother has enlivened her most recent organization with the American Lung Association.

While as of late visiting with PEOPLE about the association and its new Vape-Free Schools Initiative, the 54-year-old entertainer opened up regarding why she is standing up on the side of teaching teenagers about the risks of e-cigarette utilization.

As the mother to two youngsters — child Ellery and girl Jaya, whom she imparts to her ex, Ben Harper — Dern discloses to PEOPLE solely that she knows the risks that vaping presently stances to her children’s age. “We are in a frightening time as we take a gander at the development alone that has happened over the most recent four years with vaping among our childhood and in this country,” she says

“I’m raising young people and around a great deal of youngsters that I know and love, and it is so surprising to observe a gathering of children who were the original to say … when they saw a parent with a cigarette, when they were five, six years of age, ‘What’s happening with you? You will bite the dust,’ ” she proceeds. “Since the informing, on account of an association like the American Lung Association, and culture itself, this was the age that knew smoking kills and dependence on nicotine is unnerving. We felt like we were toward the finish of a lamentable emergency.”

“What’s more, unfortunately this age, presently a couple of years after the fact as youngsters, it has been informed to them that vaping is a more secure other option. That it’s hip, that it’s well known, that it’s simply cool, organic product seasoned juice and that there’s no risk. That it’s the protected option in contrast to smoking,” Dern adds. “What’s more, as we probably are aware, this is totally, unfortunately something contrary to valid.”

As indicated by a National Youth Tobacco Survey that was delivered back in September 2020, practically 20% of secondary school understudies are as of now vaping, denoting a pandemic that Dern calls “unnerving.”

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Presently, the American Lung Association is offering backing and preparing through its Vape-Free Schools Initiative, “another grant reserve that outfits schools with assets to forestall and decrease youth vaping and gives kids more admittance to end, backing and training,” per the association.

Furthermore, Dern says she is appreciative for crafted by the American Lung Association, which is “so profoundly centered around the climate and the natural dangers that individuals are looking as far as lung wellbeing.”

“Furthermore, clearly, in this last year-in addition to with the [COVID-19] pandemic, they have accomplished such uncommon work and gathering pledges,” she adds.