CBD & Kiddos: When is it OK?

You wanna know when it's okay? When you say it's okay. You are the parent. You are the overseer and ship steerer for your kid. The same safety standards apply to adults as they do for kids, humans at all, when it comes to CBD. Now do we typically insist you consult your physician about consuming ANYTHING? Sure. But we are also aware that not all physicians are on the CBD boat with us, so that is your prerogative 100%. Take the wheel and follow your gut when it comes to your parenting. (A whole other topic for another time.)

There’s weed to get you high, and weed to treat hardcore pain or nausea, but there’s also a third category of weed usage we can understand: self-medicating by people who don’t want to get high and who are otherwise “healthy,” but who want to manage low-key pain, anxiety or insomnia. Or just relax.

Adults say they are replacing over-the-counter pain relievers, anti-inflammatories, and antidepressants with CBD, and opting out of the liver-shredding side effects of those drugs. A recent debate on Reddit wonders whether CBD is ultimately better and safer than aspirin (a scientist made this claim in 2000). It’s increasingly being used by athletes for pain and inflammation, and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) just removed CBD from its list of banned substances.

Okay, but what about children? A quick search for whether or not it’s safe for kids turns up a number of queries by parents who wonder if it’s not a better, safer, more natural pain reliever for anxiety, pain or hyperactivity for their little one. A post this month on POPSUGAR claims that giving your kid CBD oil “could be the answer to some of their biggest struggles,” claiming it can help them with anxiety or sleep issues. Other sites document successful experiments in treating ADHD in children with CBD oil.

Most of the excitement in treating kids with CBD for a variety of ailments comes from the success story of Charlotte Figi, a 5-year-old with Dravet Syndrome who experienced multiple daily seizures, who only found relief from both the seizures and the heavy side effects of pharmaceuticals after two doctors were willing to give her CBD oil(We touched on this a few months back. We will repost!). Other children with similar issues have also reported success managing otherwise untreatable seizures. It has been studied and found effective in treating pediatric anxiety and/or insomnia related to PTSD. It has been studied and found to have a “favorable safety profile” with regard to side effects. (Compare this to the side effects of children’s ibuprofen even.)

And while, again, there are success stories for those extreme situations (like kids who have 100 epileptic seizures a day), just dosing your kid with a CBD gummy to calm them down o