A new study suggests that access to medical marijuana may increase the amount of parenting that people engage in by improving patients’ health. The study from St. Lawrence College found that medical marijuana legalization (MML) “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. 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 activities and medical care. Passive childcare, meanwhile, refers to time parents spend primarily engaged in other activities while being in the presence of the child. The study also found “no evidence” that legalization “negatively impacted productive uses of time spent on home production and market work”.
