should you ever tell your kids you smoke weed?

^ xp so don't let your pets smoke weed, I guess?

My children are 11 and 15 and have not (so far as we know) been curious, but we know that won't last forever. My wife and I don't like smoking or vaping, but we sometimes have edibles (mostly baked goods but some gummies as well). These are kept secure and separate.

If the elder one evidences any curiosity (to us), we will be honest and Have The Talk, but it hasn't come up yet. At 15 I was pretty enthusiastically into booze and drugs, so I can't exactly claim the moral high ground, but I do want them to be safe.

At some point - 18? 21? I dunno - we may go ahead and initiate the conversation ourselves. But for now I think it's okay to wait.

Not at all. That sounds difficult. Thank you for telling about it. I didn’t really have anything to go on so the more stories I hear the better.

xpost

One thing I've been thinking about is how much - as an adult - I have romanticized and idealized my teenage drug experiences. My core group of friends were a bunch of corduroy-clad hippies would smoke bowls in the woods and get peaceful with some music, and so that's what I was looking back on when I was first grappling with my kid's drug use. But in reality, I crossed paths with all kinds of different stoners - including a lot of party-til-you-puke types. So while I was anticipating that if my kid ended up doing drugs in high school, he would be sitting around listening to Pink Floyd records and perusing books of art, he ended up being part of a crew that was doing bong rips and Fireball and watching Rick and Morty and then tasing themselves for Snapchat fame.

Not to be all like "oh these millennials." Just be careful in over-applying your own experiences to your child's life. It's important to look at it holistically. Do you know his friends and their parents? Are they solid people? How thoughtful/impulsive is he? What are his other likes and interests? Do you have a decent relationship with him so far? I'm not asking you to type answers to those questions. Just things to think about.

I reckon if you sit your teenager down with a badly rolled joint and a scratched up copy of Wish You Were Here and said "cancel your evening plans" that just may be enough to put them off it forever

lol

Yeah I think I will just show them that one Rusted Root video

When i was a teenager I loved doing drugs, but I hated parties. Which was a problem, because in those days, the social expectation was to do drugs at parties. Getting high at home alone was seen as weird.

Then as now, when I am high I want to be under my own blankets, surrounded by my own books and food and art supplies and musical instruments. I don't want to be in some stranger's cold apartment, watching idiots drink Milwaukee's best from red plastic cups and shouting over a Hoobastank CD.

*belch* dude, i'm right here

I'm pretty sure most kids--at least kids over the age of 12 or 13--know if their parents smoke weed.

Smoke, yes. Hard to hide in a small house. I am not sure mine are able to detect a half a Delta-8 gummy consumed after they go to bed, but I am prepared for that to change.

I keep my gear on the top shelf of the closet wrapped in 23 nested ziplocks no one knows

probably just a buncha old pine cones in there

In high school, I regularly pilfered by stepfather's weed.

tracer your kid sounds cool

i don't have kids and i don't think i ever will so feel free to ignore me i'm mostly posting out of procrastination. i do feel like in a nature vs nurture sense dependency/addiction issues w/ substances lean far towards the nature end. i grew up in a fairly liberal and middle to upper middle class area where kids drank and smoked weed but we were all far removed from communities that have system addiction issues & what not. (tho this was essentially pre-opioid crisis). i feel like the kids i knew growing up who had really strict parents -- grounded for months for getting drunk once, made to go to "rehab" for smoking weed once etc -- ended up spinning out at some point in college and often getting into harder drugs, missing classes, dropping out, transferring home, or otherwise just charting a course in life that deviated far from the vision the parents thought they were adhering to when they dropped the hammer for basic high school substance experimentation. even the heaviest of hands aren't guaranteed to lead a kid to a certain place in life. by the same token, i did know of kids who were coddled by their parents (in general but also w/ partying) who also ended up on wayward paths as adults.

my mom and i had a sort of wink-wink understanding about partying when i was in high school... if i told her i was sleeping over at a friend's house, that was essentially code for "we will be drinking." she made me promise i would stay wherever i was and wouldn't drive drunk, which i adhered to, tho i did drive stoned all the time at that age which i wouldn't (and don't) do now. i drank to excess plenty of times in high school, vomiting profusely, crazy hungover, even w/ knowledge of my parents & i've never really had a different relationship w/ alcohol than i did at that point, which was "this is fun but also i don't really like it." she asked me once when i was 17 or 18 if i had ever done drugs harder than weed, and i truthfully said no, and she was like, ok cool that's the right answer. i smoked weed a lot in high school then not at all in college then a ton as an adult where my relationship with it became more complicated to the point that i would currently describe my relationship w/ it as... a struggle w/ a fluctuating degree of severity.

i think what i would say to a child about weed is that it's cool for certain things -- listening to music, watching a funny movie, eating potato chips -- but that at a certain point it can impede your desire or ability to complete tasks, achieve goals, socialize etc. of course, for some ppl it has the opposite effect (sparking creativity, loosening up in social situations) but it's prob good for a kid to understand that at some point it can shift from being benign at worst to... something else. (in some sense, frank ocean's mom was right.) i think ultimately there are obvious boundaries a parent could attempt to set (no smoking weed in the house, don't go to school high, no driving etc) but he's going to do what he wants to do (roll joints w/ book pages) and the best you can hope for is that he figures out what a healthy relationship w/ the substance looks like for him. there are of course ppl who get high a few times (or a bunch of times) before admitting that it's not really for them. but i feel like that comes later in life.

i think also making it clear that you can be called upon in a time of drunken or stoned peril and will come to the rescue w/ no judgement & then following thru on that (w/in reason) in a genuine way when something like that occurs can build a level of trust that deters rebellion. even a simple "looks like you had a rough one last night! haha" reaction to an obvious hangover is an implicit way of saying "i'm gonna treat you like an adult but i expect you to act like one as well" ... it's not like i always followed my mom's rules to a T but when it came to drinking i did feel like i had a certain responsibility to hold up my end of the bargain when it came to being given a pass to drink when i was 16-18.

Talk to your kids about potato chips. You don't want them to get that knowledge from their peers.

I found a Pizza Pringles can in my sons room...thank god he was only storing his marijuana in that thing.

yeah I agree with the idea that addiction goes more towards the nature end, a lot of my friends and I grew up in similar environments and we all drank, smoked weed, and would sometimes try things that were harder. some people really had a problem with it and some didn't. I guess I'm lucky I don't have that gene. I had a friend who overdosed and several of my friends were really shaken up saying "this could've been me"

good post, J0rdan.

my kids are 8 & 5 so I am thinking I probably have a while before I have to think about this. but I know it's probably gonna be sooner than I think. I think I was in 5th grade when I first went to a place where people were drinking. mostly "older kids" who were probably like 14 or 15. I didn't have the guts to try it but I did have a wine cooler in 7th grade lol. in retrospect I'm kinda glad White Claws didn't exist back then. I imagine that's responsible for a lot of underage drinking - we all had our Busch Lites and Milwaukee's Best (my first reaction: "damn, this is the best you have?") but they tasted so shitty nobody really made a habit of it.

as for weed I would probably prefer my kids get into that rather than alcohol. feel like teenagers do way more dumb shit when drunk, I sure as hell did, while my high times were mostly watching The Simpsons and weird music videos. fwiw they may have a taste for it already, my dumb ass hotboxed the house making tea for the first time not realizing what would happen if I left the lid off.

tracer, i agree with a lot of what people have said here & would like to add it's potentially a good way to conversationally segue into talking about consent & substances (i realize it's a landmine but it's also urgently needed imho)

Nah I don’t think so. I don’t want to influence whatever journey they take. I don’t think it’s helpful.

I didn't tell them while they were kids but at some point when I was answering their questions about drugs they probably drew their own conclusions

"Son, you should avoid skank weed. And roll your doobs tight but not too tight. Change your bongwater when it get opaque. Or so I have heard, from druggies."

Do you tell your kids you drink alcohol? In states where cannabis is legal I feel it shouldn't have the same kind of stigmas it does elsewhere. If you already reveal you're willing to alter your mental state with chemicals (alcohol) it shouldn't be a stretch to explain marijuana.

That said - cannabis does affect brain development (like underage drinking) so there's many great reasons to explain why abstention is important until a certain age.