A new study suggests that access to medical marijuana may increase the amount of parenting that people engage in by improving patients’ health.

Medical marijuana legalization (MML) “reduces inactive time and increases sleep, consistent with medical marijuana’s health benefits” the report, published this month in the Journal of Applied Economics, says.

“Our results suggest that MML can have significant positive impact on the development of children via increased parenting time,” the study concludes, “especially to those under the age of 6, a period characterized by high long-run returns to parental investment.”

The big caveat in the findings, researchers noted, is that the benefits apply only if parents do not misuse cannabis, noting bigger increases in parenting time “for those less likely to abuse marijuana.”

“Marijuana can provide medical benefits for those suffering from chronic pain, sleep disorder, depression, and PTSD, allowing parents to better interact with their children,” the report says, though it adds that “positive effects are not guaranteed.”

The new study was co-authored by Cynthia Bansak of the St. Lawrence University economics department and Jun Hyung Kim of the School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at South Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Both authors also represent the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany and the Global Labor Organization in Essen, Germany.

Legalizing medical cannabis “also reduces inactive time and increases sleep, consistent with medical marijuana’s health benefits.”

“We show that legalizing medical marijuana increases parenting time with children,” they wrote. “The increases are significant on active childcare activities that require less effort of the parents such as playing with the child and on passive childcare in which parents watch over children while engaging in some other activity. Looking at heterogeneous effects, the effects are greater for those who are more likely to benefit from the medical use of marijuana and for subsamples with larger baseline parenting time, such as parents who have children younger than six. The treatment effects correspond to 8% to 12% of the gap in parental time on childcare between parents with some college education and parents with less than college education.”

Active childcare, the study explains, includes the time that parents actively looked after kids, played with them or planned for their activities. It also includes schooling activitites and medical care. Passive childcare, meanwhile, refers to time parents spend primarily engaged in other activities while being in the presence of the child.

“Whereas active childcare is known to promote children’s development,” authors pointed out, “studies also show positive effects of passive care time on children’s development that are distinct from the effects of active care time.”

The research drew on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s American Time Use Survey (ATUS) between 2003 and 2019. The survey asks respondents to fill out daily time diaries in 15-minute increments.

In an effort to interpret the magnitude of the increase in parenting time, the researchers compared groups distinguished by education level, noting that parents with some college education typically spend more time on active parenting than those with less college education.

“We show that legalizing medical marijuana increases parenting time with children.”

“An increase by 4 min of active childcare represents 12.56% of the active childcare time gap by parents’ education level. Similarly, an increase of 10 min of passive childcare represents 8.92% of the passive childcare time gap by parents’ education level,” they wrote. “Measured by working hours, not-working parents spend 22 min more than working parents on active childcare (by self-reported employment status, the difference is 14 min). Then, the treatment effect on active childcare time represents 18% of the gap between working and not-working parents, and the effect on passive childcare time represents about 7% of the difference between working and not-working parents.”

Effects were greater for parents with children younger than six and during weekends.

In terms of activity, the report says, “the increases are concentrated on ‘playing with the child’ and ‘looking after the child.’ No effect is found on activities such as ‘organizing and planning for children’ or ‘arts and crafts with children.'”

“One possible explanation,” it continues, “is that the effects are observed only for time uses that require less effort for a person on pain medicine, such as passive time use and spending time with children, and not for effortful activities such as organizing and planning. This explanation is consistent with the fact that people tend to use medical marijuana as a pain medicine, providing treatment for chronic pain, sleep disorder, anxiety, and depression.”

Men appeared to increase parenting time after legalization more than women, which authors noted was consistent with earlier research indicating men increase cannabis use more after medical marijuana legalization than do women.

Notably, the observed effect was also greater in more religious states, as defined by the number of church members and religious adherents.

“In states with above-median number of churches (ignoring the sizes of churches), the effect on active childcare is small, but the effect on passive childcare is positive and significant,” the study says. “Overall, the pattern suggests that parents in states with more religious activity tend to benefit more from access to medical marijuana.”

The study also found “no evidence” that legalization “negatively impacted productive uses of time spent on home production and market work. We also do not find increased time use on tobacco and drug use or on paid medical care.”

“Taken together,” it says, “the results suggest that parents were able to increase parenting time by reducing inefficient time uses, without reducing time spent on other productive activities.”

One of the key limitations of the study, authors acknowledged, is that the ATUS data does not include information about marijuana use at the individual level. “Also, the results should be interpreted in the context of the USA which is leading the world in opioid analgesic consumption, a potential substitute for medical marijuana,” they added. “MML may have allowed patients to move away from opioid analgesic to less harmful medical marijuana.”

While there’s been limited research exploring the role of marijuana policy on parenting behavior, a study last summer found that states that legalized medical marijuana saw a nearly 20 percent drop in foster care admissions based on parental drug misuse. Legalizing for adult use, meanwhile, was not associated with any statistically significant change in foster care entries.

Separate 2022 research did identify a meaningful link between adult-use legalization and foster care drug misuse cases, however. In that study, researchers at the University of Mississippi found that recreational legalization was associated with at least a 10 percent decrease in foster care admissions on average, including reductions in placements due to physical abuse, neglect, parental incarceration and misuse of alcohol and other drugs.

Source: Ben Adlin – marijuanamoment.net