Pot-smoking parents are such a buzzkill.
Smoking weed doesn’t make parents more chill when it comes to discipline — it actually makes them more likely to punish their kids, a new study has found.
The study of 3000 California parents found that marijuana users were more likely to administer all types of discipline techniques — including timeouts, taking away privileges and spanking — on their children than non-drug users.
“There are parents who say marijuana calms then down and makes them a better parent. That’s not what we’re seeing in this particular study,” lead researcher Dr Bridget Freisthler, a professor in the College of Social Work at Ohio State University, told The Post.
The research, published Monday in the Journal of Social Work Practice in the Additions, sampled random parents in 50 Californian cities and asked them how often they used alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamine and other drugs. It found a .5-percent increase in the amount of discipline among toking parents over non-smokers.
It also probed parents on how frequently they used non-violent punishment such as timeouts, corporal punishment like spanking, and physical abuse, such as hitting a child with a fist.
Researchers found parents who reported marijuana use were more likely to control their kids than someone who didn’t smoke pot.
“That is not something we would have expected to see,” Freisthler said. “They were more likely to use all forms of discipline more often.”
Alcohol drinkers were also more likely to be helicopter parents or disciplinarians, using punishment more often than their teetotaler counterparts.
Societal attitudes toward recreational pot use are changing, with a 2017 survey from Marist College found that 54 percent of adults who use marijuana in the United States are parents.
The Post’s parenting reporter in April described how vaping cannabis extract CBD made her a more relaxed mom and helped her cope with stressful family situations.
But Freisthler said she was concerned about the impact more prevalent drug use would have in the family home.
“That’s one of the things that we want to keep an eye on,” she said. “As we’re seeing more people use drugs like marijuana, are we seeing more changes in how people parent?”
She acknowledged the study did have limitations, and could not answer whether people who were more prone to drug use also relied on coping measures to parent such as corporal and physical punishment.
“We don’t know sequencing in drug use in parenting. The question for us is what comes first and how are they related to each other — what can we do to help these people to maybe parent differently and help them cope?”
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