Washington D.C. [USA], July 17 : Using pot may not make you a more calm and relaxed parent, recent findings suggest.
According to the study, current marijuana users administered more discipline techniques of all kinds to their children on average than did non-users. That includes everything from timeouts to, in some cases, physical abuse.
"The acceptability of marijuana is growing in the United States and with that, more parents feel free to use the drug, sometimes even in front of their children. Some parents claim it makes them a better, more relaxed parent, but that may not be the case," said Bridget Freisthler, co-author of the study and professor of social work at The Ohio State University.
The effect of marijuana use on parenting is a relevant concern. A 2017 survey from Yahoo News and Marist College found that 54 percent of adults who use marijuana in the United States are parents. A majority of those parents have children under the age of 18. Some groups of "marijuana moms" claim that use makes them better parents.
The results of this new study suggest that marijuana users - who are also alcohol users - are trying to control their kids more than non-users, Freisthler suggested.
According to the researchers, the findings suggest that users may be quicker than other parents to react to minor misbehaviour.
"We can't tell from this study, but it may be that parents who use marijuana or alcohol don't want their children to spoil the buzz they have, or bother them when they have a hangover," Freisthler explained.
The findings revealed that parents who used marijuana in the past year tended to use more of all types of discipline compared to non-users, even after taking into account a variety of other factors that could impact the use of discipline techniques, such as parental stress and depression and child and parent demographics. The same was true of alcohol users.
Parents who had used alcohol or marijuana in the past, but were not at the time of the research interview, also applied most types of discipline more often than did non-users.
And the more substances that parents used, the more often they disciplined their children in all types of ways, according to the study. For example, parents who reported using the most substances practiced physical abuse at a rate of about 1.45 times greater than those who used only one substance.
Results showed that the annual frequency of physical abuse was 0.5 times higher among parents who used both alcohol and marijuana in the past year, compared to those who consumed only alcohol.