Are taking drugs and being a good parent mutually exclusive then?

[wanderlust]

I don't want to get told off lots or start a fight, its just that I (along with most of my friends - parents or not) will take drugs every now and then, but I am aware that the people I know are not necessarily representative of what's really normal or acceptable - so what does everyone really think?

im so childish i've been playing a silent game of "who'd you rather" in my head! between the two U'dads, just based on their posts!

'I still don't see the point. It's just so studenty. '

what,taking drugs?do you mean students as in university students or school children?cos i always saw uni students who took drugs as immature middle class sad twats who hadn't had a life untill mummy and daddy paid for them to go and get a degree,and they thought they'd rebel by smoking weed

I don't see the point of a lot of things other people do, such as having religious beliefs and engaging in the relevant practices, watching sport of any kind or faffing about with detox diets. But I don;t necessarily think that doing any of those things automatically makes a person a bad parent. Again, it;s not what you do, it's whether you are aware of it having a negative impact on your family. What about the people who go in for extreme (or even moderate) sports that risk them getting splattered or crippled for no really good reason apart from the fact that they enjoy doing so. Is that bad parenting? What about sticking at a job that involves long hours, when you could get a similarly paid one that didn't, because your job is important to you?

The thing about 'drugs' ie recreational illegal ones is that, like sex, a percentage of mundanes stuff their heads up their arses at the mere mention and are incapable of being logical on the subject.

Nowt wrong with childcentric.

We need stairgates
We need sterilisers
We need Dr Seuss

We don't need to be perfect

Parents should strive for balance. Not saying that we should all go out and get stoned off our faces or blind drunk. We should, however, reserve the right to do so, if we want to. For me this goes much further than whether or not we choose to occasionally have a drink or spliff. Being an individual and being a parent is more and more becoming mutually exclusive these days.

There is such pressure to conform to societal standards of the perfect parent, it somehow seems that any deviation (or at least sometimes on MN?) is viewed with contempt...

Maybe it's just me and fwiw, I don't even do drugs...(it's about choice you see).

fwiw i do think it's bad for both parents to have a drink.
it was your choice to have children, and no one thinks you should sacrifice your whole life because of it - they are only small for a little while, - but honestly it's about priorities...children or drugs
simple really

Oh FFS nearly all parents of small children spend great chunks of time in a state that's not wildly compatible with fast reactions or endless patience. It's called sleep deprivation. In this state people leave babies in shops, forget to switch off cookers, stumble into furniture etc. Yet no one calls that 'bad' or 'selfish' parenting, even if you're so zombified you drop the baby down the stairs.

thanks madamez - a point I wanted to make earlier

as for 'both parents' some of us are tout seul, knackered from working allll the time - stressed, depressed, ill, too anxious to sleep so stumbling through life with spots constantly swirling in front of my eyes, legging it up and down motorways for hours every day visiting one sick child in hospital whilst all the time worrying about getting back in time for the other children. I'm in absolutely no fit state to be looking after anyone! Life itself incapacitates us sometimes, but we muddle through - children are pretty resilient after all.

Given that we do often suffer from the (unavoidable) problems of stress and sleep deprivation, I wonder why anybody wants to make it worse with the (avoidable) addition of drug "recreation".

well if I ever get an opportunity I'll let you know!

from memory it was much more fun than extreme fatigue and anxiety tho, but don't think I had much to be worried about in those days

I don't see anything wrong with leaving children with grandparents for a weekend and partying for a night with Dh. Not that we have had that luxury in the two years that Dd has been with us. If our parents lived nearby we probably would manage once a year or something, though.

So, assuming we are not talking about being total addicts, shooting up heroin while baby screams himself blue nextdoor, no, I don't agree that being a good parent and being an occasional recreational drug user are mutually exclusive.

People I knew at university who took drugs thought they were really cool, interesting, wacky and ooh so webellious. Without exception, they were the opposite. I don't see why this should be any different later in life.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am about to go and make a recreational cup of tea. I may even push the boat out and have a recreational Kit-Kat. A dark one, of course. I do the hard stuff, me.

a man after my own heart UnquietDad!

I like to think I can be cool, interesting and sometimes even wacky without needing drugs to do it for me...........

I don't think anyone was claiming that recreational drug use makes you cool and wacky. THey were just stating that they found it enjoyable, and that if proper precautions are taken (arranging babysitters etc) the occaisonal indulgence in something you enjoy does not make you a bad parent.

THis reminds me of all the guff about how fwagile and delicate women are, especially pregnant ones, and how they shouldn't do anything risky or strenuous (especially if they enjoy it) - yet they are not too delicate to be expected to lug a baby, a pushchair, a toddler and three bulging carrier bags of shopping up two flights of stairs on a regular basis. Parenthood does not actually allow us to be in a permantent state of optimum, well fed, well rested awareness, and as long as we take the necessary care we are damn well entitled to do stuff that is purely for our pleasure now and again.

even illegal stuff..........

The phrase "recreational drug use" makes me uncomfortable. Is "drug abuse" considered too Daily Mail now? (Or maybe it's "re-creational". As in, it re-creates the cells of your brain and makes them into mush.)

Madamez, sleep deprivation from having a small baby and using drugs is wildly different.

Well, 'drug abuse' tends to imply a habit that is causing a person problems rather than an occasional enjoyable indulgence. UQD, you often post very logical arguments on other threads, yet your logic seems to be deserting you on this subject. Brain cells are dying off and being replaced on a daily basis, for one thing.
Also, this whole idea that there are some substances it's OK to enjoy despite the fact that they have mild to moderate mood-changing effects, yet other substances are - Waaaah! Naughty! - jut because of the laws, is a very silly one. Most of the laws around which drugs can be used for enjoyment (alcohol, chocolate, caffeine) and which only on medical grounds (heroin, cocaine) and which are so WICKED that they can't even be used medically (cannibis sativa, despite all the evidence showing that, in regulated doses, it is a very safe analgesic) were formlated on political rather than health grounds. All the banning of opiates, etc was more to do with the war with China and the Boxer Rebellion than the percieved health risk of opium use.

I don't think UnquietDad is being illogical on here madamez - it is just that you happen to disagree with him - does disagreeing with you make someone illogical? [sceptical]

and whether the laws are (in your opinion) daft or not...it is another reason to avoid drugs, and another impact on your children. Also because it is illegal, it is not easy and openly available, and you must come into contact with some unsavoury characters!

I think people are forgetting that taking drugs does not mean 'Oh, I'll have a little bit of this heroin or cocaine'

No. It means, 'I'll put this cocktail of goodness knows what into my body and hope I get high rather than die'.

It's one thing to campaign for a change in the drug laws - or any other laws - if you think they are daft. It's quite another to break them anyway.

I disagree with madamez's definition of "abuse" above - to me it means not an addiction/a problem necessarily, but misusing a substance, i.e. using a drug for a purpose other than the medical one for which it was originally intended.

Cocaine, for example, was among other things a topical anaesthetic, not something to be gleefully snorted in nightclub toilets by fashionistas with more money than sense and daft posh girls born with a silver straw up their noses. MDMA has been used in psychotherapy and more recently to combat post-traumatic stress disorder; I bet those who synthesised it never imagined it would end up being the stimulant of choice of monged-out crowds dressed in stupid T-shirts and whistles and leaving their brains somewhere in a field in Hampshire. Etc.

I have to have a drug - a legal one - every day for a condition I have, but I can't imagine ever taking it (or anything else I'd have on an occasional basis, e.g. paracetamol or Nurofen) for fun.

Mademez, brain cells, once dead, are not replaced. Not neurones anyway. There seems to be a little more flexibility in glial cells, but once you've fucked up your neurones, they are gone.

and there was a rather sad group of 'ultra parkinsonian' patients in the States who found this out to their cost when they 'indulged' and blew a bloody great big hole where their substantia Niagra used to be.

I know two people who died of heart attacks in their 40's suspected to be a result of cocaine use in the past few years. Neither were what you would probably consider addicts, thoughby Unquiet Dads definition probably drug "abusers".

No doubt there are also plenty of people who also killed themself from drinking too much alcohol, driving cars too fast etc but surely that isn't an argument for drug use is it. Surely we should keep a grip on the things which cause such damage and are already illegal and morally more frowned upon and start trying to educate people about the dangers of more socially acceptable vices.

I'm really not taking the moral high ground - believe me, I'm not healthy enough to be preaching to others who do things to their body which causes harm. I have an uneasy (polite euphemism) relationship with food but I don't try to pretend that its anything but bad for me. Or try to convince anyone that because others drink and I don't that me eating myself to an early heart attack is OK. It isn't.

We've gone off the point here but since some of you are anti-drugs because they are illegal/morally repugnant, I'd like to say that there are some pretty nasty prescribed drugs which a section of the population are forced to take (eg people with a diagnosis of psychosis)and the undesirable effects of some common drugs eg ibuprofen (interferes with ovulation)are not widely known. Imo the fact that a drug is illegal does not make it wrong. I find it hard to be allegiant to a government that is stealing hard earned money of ordinary people by way of overt and stealth taxes. I'm not surprised people spend whatever is left from their salary on something that helps them forget they're being robbed!

if thats not going off the point what is??

though fwiw i do agree that this government is awful!