Photo-Illustration: Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty Images During my Gen-X childhood it was totally normal for my friends’ parents to smoke cigarettes while driving a car full of kids home from swim team or soccer practice. Today, especially in my white, middle-class social circles, that would be a scandal, albeit an incredibly boring and judgy one.Most of the parents I know are happy to take a gummy to help with sleep or occasionally smoke a bowl or joint for fun and relaxation.
The problem with this, of course, is that harm is subjective — what a parent might consider equivalent to consuming a glass of wine, or taking a medication for high blood pressure or chronic pain, might be seen as drug use through more conservative eyes. In New York State, parents and guardians cannot be accused of neglect or abuse simply for using cannabis.
Alcohol isn’t just accepted in parenting culture, it’s ubiquitous, and, in the case of the “wine mom,” even celebrated — not that this is necessarily a good thing. There’s a paradox here, a deep kind of weed hypocrisy that I admit to perpetuating. Personally, I believe cannabis to be less harmful to the human body and spirit than alcohol, and I believe it can be therapeutic, for sleep, for anxiety, for pain, in a way that alcohol just isn’t.
When I ask other parents to share their current cannabis philosophies with me, a few nearly universal concerns emerge, some of them grounded in lessons we’ve learned as a society since my ’80s childhood. Driving while high is dangerous. Secondhand smoke is not good for young lungs. Edibles that look like candy need to be handled with care.
“It’s called the harm-reduction model, this idea that if you just introduce alcohol to kids in a non-hyped way, not a forbidden-apple way, you show them that you can have one beer or one glass of wine with dinner, then that is going to turn them into responsible drinkers,” Epstein explains. “It turns out that introducing kids to alcohol at a young age is a terrible idea. Because all you’re actually doing is introducing an addictive substance.
Adolescent brain development was top of mind for Alix as she was feeling her way through parenting two teenagers. On a family trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, she was struck by an exhibit on brains that highlighted the way that neural pathways are formed and how repeated behavior, or substance use, can shape the brain. “These pathways that you develop at adolescence can really get burned in really deep, deep grooves,” she says.
annalieseg How precious. Do you worry about that 6pack or that nice pinot?