The news cycle has been littered with stories of kids eating weed or being poisoned by edibles for the last few years. This alarming tale harkens back to a need for more education. Regulatory bodies should be teaching parents more about safe storage, and parents should be talking to their kids about weed.
In my line of work, I regularly get packages filled with cannabis accessories or hemp products, and my toddler loves to help me open them (as toddlers do). Some parents may believe that I should shy away from letting the kid open boxes of weed and related items. However, I use these moments as a small learning tool for a greater cause.
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I am no parenting expert. I am surviving day by day like most people who are shepherding tiny tyrants known as toddlers. That said, I’m proud of my approach to parenting around pot. This is how I do it.
Pot parenting conversations can start early
Kids are not stupid. They are in tune with our tone and inflection. If my three-year-old senses I’m asking him who taught him something because he thinks I’m mad, he will immediately “forget.” This is important to remember while talking about weed. Cannabis, pot, marijuana, weed: none of these are dirty words.
Using sensationalist tones or fearful verbiage may stick with a child. Whether it scares them off or entices them to find out for themselves depends on the kid. I was of the “eff around and find out” variety myself.
As we open packages with the latest dab device or my kiddo looks at my cannabis seedling growing (while he wears the proper eye protection), I speak simply about what they are as if we were at the grocery store discussing pasta shapes. With tiny people, things are often only complicated if you complicate them.
He will often look at a futuristic piece of tech or my lockbox containing flower and other products and ask me: “What is that Mommy?” I will answer with “Mommy’s medicine” or “a tool I use for my medicine.” He rarely has follow-up questions, and won’t ask another question provided devices aren’t openly sitting in shared spaces.
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Learn as you go, pivot when needed
Let me be clear, there are no open containers of flower or water-filled bongs in our living room. He isn’t handling edibles or concentrates. But cannabis is a part of my life, so he will see these things in short, supervised moments. My weed is secured behind a child-locked door, up stairs, through another door, and in a locked box.
As he gets older, this will obviously get more complicated, but I believe that losing the sensationalist approach to pot will only make it easier to speak on the subject through each stage of his life. Learning together as we go, my current parenting strategy, will also help our family of three figure it out together. And perhaps knowing about his mom’s medicine will make him less apt to experiment in dangerous situations.
Reading story after story about children eating cannabis and going to the hospital or kids bringing garden gummies to school to share is enough to spark fear in a well-meaning parent. Perhaps the answer is to get ahead of things by regularly holding unfettered conversations. That’s what I’m doing, I will report back in 15 years whether it worked.
