In the small surfing town of Kommetjie, there’s a group of moms who get together after dropping off their children at school and, well, toke.

It’s their way of de-stressing, and who can blame them? Kids can be mean, demanding and hard work. Kind of like how life with a toddler is depicted in this cartoon series.

[“Not my child,” pipes up Sue in the back corner. Sit down, Sue, this is not about you.]

However, there are a lot of contentious issues around the subject.

In the middle of last year, the photo above went viral and caused controversy, but at the same time it was also able to stimulate a conversation around THC and breastfeeding, reports The Guardian:

Jenn Lauder, an Oregon cannabis activist who co-founded Splimm, a newsletter on pot and parenting, with her husband, chided the breastfeeder for exposing the baby to smoke and for the “optics” of the image.

“That mom could have made better choices,” Lauder told me recently. The former teacher has said that while she did not use cannabis when pregnant with her daughter, she resumed shortly after giving birth, and while breastfeeding, to mitigate postpartum depression.

Lauder added: “I’ve yet to see compelling evidence that a lactating mother’s cannabis consumption produces any negative effects for a nursing child.”

However, doctors don’t agree:

THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, is transmitted in breastmilk, according to a recent study. And while the effect on newborns hasn’t been intensely studied, the chemical is widely believed to impair brain development.

But putting the relationship between breastfeeding and THC aside – especially since not all parents breastfeed, and the ones that do don’t for long – the reality is that some parents “believe cannabis improves their child rearing”:

Aside from the more fraught area of breastfeeding, marijuana, as cannamoms and cannadads see it, relieves the tedium of parenting while helping them engage with their children. The phrase that keeps coming up is “being present”.

With marijuana, “I’m able to sit and play Legos for an extensive period of time or make dinner and make it more fun rather than something functional,” said April Pride, founder of Van der Pop, a line of stylish cannabis accessories for women.

She said it also helped break up the monotony of spending more time at home.

A New Jersey restaurant owner and dad, who asked that his name not be printed, said he had continued to use cannabis in moderation as a parent, but didn’t involve his “super well-adjusted” kids in it. “There’s too much taboo about it. It’s the equivalent of having a couple glasses of wine in my life.”

Pride said: “For me, alcohol feels more like an escape … And cannabis feels like something I participate in because I want to be more involved in what I’m doing.”

Lauder doesn’t give cannabis to her daughter because of the risks it poses to brain development, but she hopes when her daughter gets older she’ll consider marijuana as an alternative to alcohol. “For her, it’s just another kind of medicine.”

Then, there’s this beauty:

For a different perspective, I reached out to an old friend whose father is a daily pot smoker. As a kid, he said, his father was unhappy with his work. He knew after dad came home and spent some time in the basement, he’d be in a better mood. “He was a lot chiller,” my friend said, and “more likely to give in to stuff.”

My friend saw other individuals use different drugs and suffer dire consequences but the only negative side-effect my friend noticed with his father was that he had a “memory like a Wiffle ball. I never knew if he was going to remember if we had a conversation or not.”

In other words, a memory like a sieve.

Oh, and about those Kom moms? They’re not the only ones – meet Beverly Hills’ Marijuana Moms:

Now that’s real life, babes.

[source:theguardian]