The Moms Who Smoke Weed to Parent
· The Atlantic
Taylor Mitchem’s baby was born in March 2020. By the time they both left the hospital, the world had shut down. Mitchem had no extended family nearby, no friends who could visit. Her husband was around, but because he was nervous about the newborn’s fragility, she felt responsible for most of the child care. Her postpartum days were endless and isolating, the challenges heightened by the day-to-night transition of infant care, she said—“seeing the sun come up and then seeing the sun go down and knowing you’re in it, nowhere to go, no escape.”
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Eventually, infant pressures were replaced by toddler demands; she still felt isolated and yearned for support even more. Before pregnancy and breastfeeding, Mitchem told me, she sometimes turned to weed to feel more balanced when she struggled with anxiety and ADHD. So by the time her kid was two and a half, she decided to resume her old morning ritual: She began to smoke daily—“gardening,” as she calls it. Parenting, she said, became less stressful. “Life is hard,” she said. “If you can have something that can take the edge off a little bit, why not?”
Mitchem, a 36-year-old based in Colorado, now calls herself a “garden momma.” She posts about her cannabis routine to more than 120,000 followers on TikTok, where more than 76,000 videos feature the “#gardenmom” label. “Coffee and coughy,” a morning ritual of smoking before the children wake up, is a common genre; other videos show moms using cannabis during nap time or before the dinner-bath-bedtime witching hour. For some, posting about the lifestyle has led to influencer status and brand partnerships; many garden moms use the same Millennial-chic glass gravity bongs, sharing discount codes and #ad hashtags. As these women frame it, cannabis is not escape but preparation, the “medicine” they need to take before their work as mothers begins.
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The potential risks of parenting while high are obvious. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that adults avoid using cannabis in front of children and that they keep all products locked and out of reach. Children who grow up seeing drug reliance may be more likely to develop an addiction themselves, and sooner. Even when safety measures are taken, some child-development experts worry about how daily use might impair a parent’s reaction time and ability to respond to an emergency. And although most states have laws that allow for medical or recreational use of cannabis, the drug remains illegal at the federal level. Parents risk intervention if a child-protection agency determines that their drug use has impaired their ability to parent. (Here, racial dynamics can come into play. Most of the mothers posting “coffee and coughy” videos online are white; the people most likely to be punished for cannabis use are not.)
Mitchem and other mothers I spoke with insisted that they were not putting weed first. Rather, they said, lacking meaningful parenting help from other adults, they were prioritizing their family by using cannabis as a tool: to help them stay patient, to respond neutrally to their children, to be present without becoming overwhelmed—essentially, to be better moms. They talked about smoking not to get randomly stoned but to get through specific situations, and only under certain conditions. They would not smoke while pregnant or breastfeeding, for instance, and they would always wait a certain number of hours after smoking before undertaking activities such as driving their child to school.
For many garden moms, daily cannabis use is a balm for the impossible math of modern motherhood, where the demands are high and support systems tend to be meager. But when a substance becomes a requirement for managing the ordinary needs of caring for children, the line between beneficial use and overreliance can be hard to discern.
The desire for a reprieve from parenting—and the use of substances to get it—is hardly new. In the 1950s and ’60s, the tranquilizer Miltown was widely prescribed to housewives for anxiety and stress. Later, Valium (dubbed “mother’s little helper”) became the go-to prescription. More recently, “wine mom” culture has become so normalized that you can find onesies embroidered with lines such as I’m the reason mommy drinks.
In the era of intensive parenting, garden moms tend to classify cannabis use less as an indulgence and more as an opportunity for self-care. Mid-century mothers commonly left their children alone with little oversight; today’s mothers, according to a 2016 sociology study of the United States and some European countries, spend nearly twice as much time on active child care as they did in the 1960s. And many practice versions of “gentle” parenting, which emphasizes empathy and connection with kids and eschews punishment. The combination means that lots of mothers feel that they must not only offer constant supervision but also stay joyful and patient through repetitive activities that can be, frankly, exhaustingly boring for adults.
As the bar for what constitutes “good parenting” rises, many people are reaching for coping strategies, Alan E. Kazdin, a psychology and child-psychiatry professor at Yale University, told me. So it’s perhaps unsurprising to see moms reaching for pot: Some of the psychological effects of cannabis—decreased inhibition, feelings of relaxation—happen to encourage behavior touted by proponents of gentle parenting.
Mitchem said that after smoking, she has an easier time sprawling on the floor and being goofy with her 6-year-old, happily answering the same questions over and over again. Meg, 33, who lives in New York and asked to go by only her first name, told me that when she was a kid, a raised voice was the standard response when she acted out. The gentle approach appeals to her because she wants to parent differently—but it doesn’t always come naturally, especially when her 3-year-old is melting down. Using cannabis in this scenario, she said, is “the most beneficial thing I can do as a parent.”
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Isolation, and the struggles of handling parenting largely on their own, is also a theme for garden moms. They typically don’t work outside the home, and their videos portray their weed use as a solitary ritual: a mother with her gravity bong before sunrise, or standing in the kitchen blowing smoke into the oven vent while her kids play in the other room.
But a sense of community comes from the comments: On garden-mom videos, thousands of mothers validate one another’s choices, in a tone that skews less judgmental than the comments on traditional mom-influencer pages. Unlike many other influencer posts, garden-mom videos generally lack polish. They’re filmed in unfinished basements or drafty garages; mothers wear bulky winter coats over pajamas, their hair sometimes appearing unwashed, their desperation for a moment alone palpable. When so much of motherhood is carefully curated and aspirationally filtered online, the responses on garden-mom videos can read like the commenters are experiencing a collective sigh of relief.
Mitchem told me that cannabis has even helped her start weaning off of Zoloft. “What I’m doing is allowing me to make sure that my house is taken care of, that I’m taken care of, that my kids are taken care of,” she said, “and to set the tone for my day.”
Chances are, these women are indeed feeling some comfort from using weed, Margaret Haney, the director of Columbia University’s Cannabis Research Laboratory, told me. Anxiety, sleep, and pain, she said, “all have an extraordinarily high placebo-response rate, meaning that if you think you’re taking something helpful, you do feel better.” But there is “no good evidence” that cannabis helps with anxiety or depression, she said. Addiction is also a very real potential consequence. At least one in 10 regular cannabis users develops a dependency, a rate comparable to alcohol, and signs of addiction are similar too: escalating or morning use; difficulty stopping; withdrawal symptoms including irritability, sleep disruptions, and anxiety when trying to quit.
Daily use of cannabis also has the potential to worsen anxiety and depression over time. What feels like cannabis helping a garden mom cope may actually be the drug treating the withdrawal symptoms it’s created, Haney said. And someone who “wakes and bakes” may be engaging in particularly problematic use. “We were in reefer madness for so long that there’s been this enormous pendulum shift to everything cannabis being good,” Haney said. “There’s a middle ground.”
The potency of today’s cannabis makes these concerns hard to dismiss. With THC levels in some products reaching up to 90 percent—compared with roughly 4 percent in the 1990s—the drug these mothers are using is fundamentally different from previous generations’. Higher concentrations of THC are associated with faster development of tolerance and a greater likelihood of dependence.
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But apprehension about garden moms’ use can extend beyond dependency. Although many of these women report turning to cannabis to help them practice gentle parenting, the science suggests that the drug may actually be working against them. Being chemically calm is not the same as being fully present or prepared to act quickly if something goes wrong, Kirby Deater-Deckard, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who studies stress in parents, told me. Psychology research shows that a parent’s ability to emotionally regulate involves reading their child in real time and responding with thoughts, words, and behaviors that are sensitive to what he or she needs in a particular moment. Relying on a substance, Deater-Deckard said, can interfere with that fuller response, even when it produces the desired effect of a seemingly unruffled parent.
The more than $30 billion cannabis industry has a stake in mothers believing that their daily habits are a valuable tool; according to one 2020 study, Americans who use cannabis every or nearly every day represent more than 40 percent of the market and account for about 80 percent of all sales. Josh Camitta, the chief brand officer for the cannabis-accessory wholesaler Medusa Distribution, told me that the company has seen a notable uptick in inbound interest from garden-mom-influencer partners compared with other brand partners—a sign, he said, of a new or growing customer segment.
Mitchem has heard the warnings before, and acknowledged that some garden moms are “just in the garage smoking all day.” “There’s a really delicate way to do it,” she said, “and then there’s a way to abuse it.” But she believes that cannabis can be used in a responsible way while one parents, she said: “I just need that little dimmer switch.”
I’m not a garden mom—I’ve been sober for eight years—but at the same time, I could sympathize with many of the women I spoke with. What keeps me calibrated is not a substance but a set of circumstances I’m lucky to have: a partner who shows up, grandparents who live nearby, child care, access to therapy, and a recovery community that has taught me that feelings are survivable. Still, I have moments when the weight of parenting lands squarely on my chest. I understand how the expectations for mothers can feel unsustainable: Be always serene; spend abundant time with your children; never show a glimmer of frustration. At a certain point, the ideal can begin to feel as if it requires a disappearing act. In the quest to be the best, a mother is asked to abandon herself and her own emotional responses—and for some moms, apparently, the only way through is to feel a little less.