The annual worldwide celebration of marijuana smoking, a.k.a. 4/20, has always struck me as a little bit awkward. This is because the day on which it falls and from which it gets its name — April 20 — {+ } also happens to be the birthday of Adolf Hitler, a man whose memory (for most) does not inspire the kind of good vibes one hopes to achieve at a weed festival. Hitler, as a 4/20 reveller might put it, was not a chill dude.

The federal Liberal party, on the other hand, is doing its best to prove that it’s packed full of chill dudes and of course, dudettes. (It’s 2017, after all.)

Last month, amid criticism that they lack progressive chops, the Libs announced plans to table legislation that may very well give Canada a brand new, Hitler-free 4/20 all its own. To be more specific, if things go as planned for Trudeau’s Liberals, marijuana will be officially legal in the great white north on July 1, 2018. Goodbye 4/20. Hello Cannabis Day. I mean Canada Day.

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The fireworks will be so trippy, the hamburgers so juicy, and the parents of teenagers: so un-chill.

After all, one of the most common criticisms levelled at legal weed is that it will negatively impact Canadian youth. That it will turn teenagers’ minds to putty and persuade even the most prudish Poindexter to trade in his good sense for a ride on the reefer train, because when something previously illegal suddenly turns legit, well, who can resist?

But if you are a parent sick with worry, I have good news for you. Because it turns out there is something extremely easy that you can do to prevent the pot-fuelled collapse of Canadian youth and the transformation of Canada Day into Cannabis Day next July 1:

Relax. Chill out. Have a glass of wine in the bath and maybe if you’re up to it, engage the adolescent under your roof in a calm and reasonable discussion about the potential dangers of smoking pot.

Because despite how much we may worry about and reprimand young people for smoking marijuana or drinking beer, or freebasing heroin (just kidding) research suggests that it is the opposite approach — the non-authoritarian approach — that produces the soberest result.

According to a study from 2014, kids with uncompromisingly strict parents are more likely to use drugs and alcohol. The study, in which researchers surveyed more than 7,000 European youth from six different countries, suggests that a tough love “authoritarian” style of parenting, characterized by controlling behaviour and a lack of affection, is far less effective at preventing teens from using drugs than an “authoritative” parenting style (characterized by setting reasonable limits) or even, surprisingly, an “indulgent” parenting style (characterized by setting practically no limits for your kids at all).

That’s right: the teen whose hippie dad says “you and your friends are welcome to light up in the backyard” is far less likely to be a stoner than the kid whose parents threaten him with military school if he so much as looks at a joint.

Of course, the whole hippie-parents-with-a-straight-edge-teenager scenario is a well-worn TV trope: on MTV’s Faking It, a 2014 teen comedy about an Austin, Texas high school, one of the lead characters, 15-year-old Karma, is consistently mortified by her pot-smoking, free-love-making parents and she eschews their lifestyle like the plague.

But you don’t often hear about this kind of TV trope making its way into real life. And yet, perhaps in some places where legal weed is the law of the land, it already has. According to a survey from last year, marijuana use among teens in Colorado — a state where marijuana has been legal for four years — actually dropped slightly between 2011 and 2015. In 2011, a year before legalization, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment recorded marijuana use among high school students at 22 per cent; in 2015, two years into legalization, that number dropped to 21.2 per cent.

Sure, experts abound who say it’s too early in the history of legal weed to tell whether this tiny dip in use means anything. It could, in the end, have less to do with legal weed and more to do with social media or video gaming — increasingly the preferred vice of many teens.

But at the risk of jumping to a premature conclusion, is it not possible that the slight dip in marijuana use among Colorado teens is at least partially the result of indulgent parents and by extension, an indulgent state?

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Perhaps when a government removes the illicitness of a drug and in turn, its stigma, there are parents who stop worrying themselves into an authoritarian frenzy about arrests and sullied permanent records. And their kids, as a result, simply lose interest in pissing them off.

Something to remember then, before you lay into your teen when he or she invariably smokes up on Canada Day next year: there may be no deterrent to rebellion more powerful on this earth than your own enthusiastic seal of approval.