Does Legal Recreational Marijuana Affect Parenting? Evidence on Time Spent Eating Out, Home-cooked Meals and Overweight Children

By the end of 2015, four states legalized recreational marijuana use (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington). Under these laws which are relatively similar across these states, adults aged 21 and older are able to legally purchase marijuana for recreational use. We use a difference-in-differences and synthetic control identification strategies and various sources of data and show that the likelihood of a child being overweight decline by 4-5 percentage point following the legalization of recreational marijuana. Exploring the underlying mechanism, we show that parents spend more time on preparing food at home and spend less time with their children eating meals away from home. This in turn has led to a relative decline in the expected probability that a child is overweight relative to other states not changing the legality of marijuana. The relative reduction in the rate of children becoming overweight is robust to including child fixed effects, suggesting that children are less likely to become overweight from before to after the legalization in recreational marijuana than in other states.

To study the link between laws legalizing recreational marijuana and childhood weight, we use the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) restricted-use Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey- Kindergarten (ECLS-K), class of 2010-2011. This nationally representative survey follows the same children who were in kindergarten in 2010-2011. The last available wave surveys third-grade children by the end of Jun 2014. Next round (fourth graders surveyed by the end of July 2015) will be available in spring 2018 and will be added to the study accordingly. Height and weight of all children were reported from which the Body Mass Index (BMI) was calculated. The child’s overweight and obesity status were constructed using the Center for Disease Control and Preventions’ (CDC) standard. In the regression models we control for a set of individual-level variables, state minimum wages, a dummy indicating if the state has active dispensaries for medical marijuana, and state (or county) and wave fixed-effects. All standard errors are clustered allowing for the non-independence of observations from the same state.

To explore the mechanism by which the legalization could affect childhood weight, we utilize the 2005-2015 American Time Use Survey and construct two measures of time use. The first one is the amount of time spent on preparing food at home and the second measure is the amount of time spent in restaurants (and bars) with own child. Interestingly, results indicate that after the legalization, time spent on preparing food at home increases significantly while time spent by parents with their child in restaurants declines.

Given the increase in marijuana use following the legalization, parents are likely willing to reduce their children’s exposure to the environment in which marijuana users might smoke marijuana. Alternatively, there might be a labor market scenario. Considering an overall increase in demand for dining out after legalization, an increase in food prices in bars and restaurants are possible. This increase in price might cause a decline in demand for dining out among household with children.