So much of the discourse about maternity these days, both positive and negative, revolves around babies. On the positive side, common refrains are about the ephemeral sweetness of baby smiles and toddler snuggles, being nap-trapped and inhaling that special infant scent. On the negative side, moms lament the lack of sleep, the endless stuff, and the incessant crying. 
It makes sense that babyhood tends to get top billing. It’s a special, intense time. It’s also the time closest to another preoccupation of today’s conversation about parenting more broadly: whether or not to become one (or whether or not to become one again). 
That said, the bulk of parenthood — both the work and the joy — isn’t baby-centered. 
As I come to the likely end of my family’s baby years, with my youngest of four sons about to turn three while his eldest brother approaches 12, I find myself reflecting on our transition to this “all kids, no babies” stage. 
Putting the “sweet” in bittersweet 
My third son started kindergarten last week. Until now, he’s been in part-time preschool. I can’t deny that I cried more than a few tears when it hit me that this is my new normal. I put the two-year-old down for a nap in his toddler bed the other day and, for the first time since his birth, there was no big brother downstairs waiting for me. And, of course, even this new normal is ephemeral. 
In a matter of weeks, the toddler bed will be gone. (An eagerly awaited second set of bunk beds is due to arrive any day.) Moreover, in a matter of months, no one will be napping at all. I probably haven’t had my final contact nap just yet (lots of big brothers means lots of sporting event sidelines at nap time) but it’s coming — and soon. 
Having kids means that you’re always grieving what you’re losing, enjoying what you’re observing, and anticipating what’s next at the same time. Having several kids means that you’re sometimes doing all of these things on overdrive. 
I have been reading to my crew over breakfast since 2021; when the third one came along, nights got too unpredictable for more than a few picture books. But we take a break over the summer. When we resumed our school year read-aloud routine a few days ago, I was delighted not to have to shout over my two-year-old, who babbled at the height of his voice during this ritual throughout last school year. Instead of competing with me for attention, he was engrossed in listening to &#8220;Stuart Little.&#8221; What a joy! Then I thought about how my oldest will be off to high school in a few short years. This time with four attentive listeners around the breakfast table is fleeting indeed. 
See? Overdrive. 
Here’s the thing: Taking joy in your kids’ growth does not eliminate its simultaneous sadness. Especially because, in a normal and healthy family ecology, each kid grows up faster than the one before. My two-year-old has five-year-old interests, while my five-year-old has eight-year-old ones. 
But we can choose what we focus on. The centering of all our conversations around babies and babyhood makes it harder to zero in on the unique and equally special time with older children. 
Sometimes, the emotional un-relatability of the moms who are “just so glad to be done” and seem to resent the waning demands of their kids’ little years makes the rest of us reluctant to admit that a family with everyone out of diapers does bring its own blessings. 
Laying the foundation for family joy
There isn’t actually a binary between “I want to be forever drowning in babies” and “liberate me from this maternal hell.” 
Motherhood looks and feels different at different stages. Right now, for me, it looks and feels like finally being able to pay attention to my tweens’ baseball games and cross country meets instead of wrangling a fussy baby. 
In that liminal space — active maternity, but not matrescence — there can and will be real joy if you let yourself acknowledge it. 
Here’s some advice, from someone in this transitional stage, for putting yourself in a position to do just that.
When they’re still little, sweat the big stuff but not the small stuff. Have you ever met an otherwise functional adult who can’t tie her shoes or drink from a normal cup? I haven’t. These kinds of readiness milestones come on their own, and it doesn’t really matter all that much when. There’s no need to push. There are, however, things worth pushing on. Being a sort of “tiger mom for behavior” pays enormous dividends because well-behaved, mannerly big kids are a lot of fun, while ill-behaved, boorish ones are mostly a nightmare. Moreover, initiating and following through early on skills such as potty training, reading, socializing, and swimming puts your kid in a position to be independent and sideline you — behaviorally, academically, athletically, and socially. Which is exactly what you want because it’s exactly what’s good for him or her (maternal pangs aside). 
Be a cheerleader where you can. So much of the ennui of big kid parenting comes from over-involvement. It’s not just the rides everywhere. It’s the chore and academic scaffolding appropriate for seven-year-olds when kids are 11 and the behavioral concerns appropriate for three-year-olds when kids are seven. When you insist on high standards early, though, you can just sit back and cheer for your kid pretty often. If all the “musts” — such as appropriate behavior, basic manners, reading, and so on — were taken care of years ago, then you can experience your big kid’s wins (and losses) purely as his or her number one fan. In this context, individuation can be quite sweet indeed. In the past six months alone, I’ve watched my oldest son win his school’s “pi” contest, my older two sons win their rec league baseball championship, and my third-born run his first ever cross-country race. It’s sublime. 
Introduce them to your favorite things. I have only one rule for those morning read-alouds: It has to be a book I like. Obviously, I am attentive to what my kids will like, too. But as kids get older, you can replace the monotony of “Little Blue Truck” with stories that also engage you. Even though I have boys, I’ve read them most of my “girlie” favorites, from &#8220;Little Women&#8221; to the American Girl series. This also goes for movies, hobbies, and plenty more. My 11-year-old is a real competitor at Scrabble now. My husband and I have enjoyed rewatching so many of our favorite films through his eyes and his brothers’, as well as introducing them to so many of our favorite local and vacation spots. 
Tell them the truth. With older kids, you can have real conversations. You don’t actually have to sugar-coat what happened in the news — or what you think about it. (You should probably inculcate the virtue of tact first, though). You can bring them into the intellectual and moral trust that you share with your spouse to create a family culture of reason and integrity in a wider world that lacks both. And, honestly, that is pretty great, in more ways than one. 
***
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including <a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/about" target="_blank" rel="noopener">on Substack</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Motherhood Stage Nobody Talks About Might Be The Best One

family

lifestyle

motherhood

parenting

While the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic may seem like old news, Americans, particularly American moms, are still reeling from the lockdowns. Depending on the area, Americans were functionally isolated from others for anywhere from three months to three years. In that short span of time, we got used to doing without certain informal social gatherings and in-person commitments, although our hearts and minds didn’t need them any less. The social fabric has yet to recover.
For moms, post-COVID social isolation is uniquely difficult to shake. As certain segments of society slowly revert to pre-lockdown norms, a mom’s social life is far harder to rebuild. For instance, back-to-office mandates force employees back to daily socialization with other people. But there’s no such mandate for full-time homemakers. The life of a stay-at-home mom does not necessarily require socialization. She can simply be in her house all day and still do her work as a mother. That&#8217;s right there in the name we commonly use to refer to moms who don’t work outside the home full time. Moms should resist the temptation to isolate as much as they can. Yet when the network of other moms is itself lacking, bleak statistics on maternal loneliness make all the more sense.
Millennial and Gen Z mothers are lonely at extraordinary rates. A survey from Motherly <a href="https://mother.ly/news/the-lonliness-of-modern-motherhood/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://mother.ly/news/the-lonliness-of-modern-motherhood/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788638739296000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3P462CK-bGKhAJZ8RwWQ6g">reports</a> that 82% of mothers said that they are lonely. While some of that is due to a lack of support, especially intergenerational support, it is telling that almost 90% of surveyed moms also reported that most of their socialization occurred online, not in-person. A study in the Journal of Clinical Gynecology &amp; Obstetrics <a href="https://jcgo.org/index.php/jcgo/article/view/824/513" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://jcgo.org/index.php/jcgo/article/view/824/513&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788638739296000&amp;usg=AOvVaw24hTOT4p5-zPQQG5ASDZwj">found</a> that 58.6% of mothers reported feeling lonelier after the COVID-19 pandemic than before.
Indeed, even the often-used term “stay-at-home mom” says something about how we as a society view full-time homemaking. Staying within the four walls of one’s house is not necessary to live out one’s life as a homemaker. In fact, it can be outright unhelpful if done to excess. Homemaker appears to be a far better term than “stay-at-home mom,” as it implies a vocation that is oriented toward the home, that is, the social unit of her husband and children, while not always occurring within the home as a physical building.
While social media moms groups are great ways to find and organize socialization for homemakers, this mom-to-mom support can’t remain online to be effective at combating loneliness. Moving from online interactions to an in-person hangout is still a massive societal hurdle in our post-COVID world.
Make it happen
The most effective way to combat maternal loneliness is to be the inviter. Don’t wait for an already well-formed mom group to materialize alongside you. Play dates are the ultimate mom hack, since you and your children both get social time. They can be scheduled at any time, hosted at your house or another mom’s, with zero cost, and are an effective way a mom can socialize that doesn’t require the hassle of securing good child care to happen.
Be the hostess
We have to become comfortable with the idea of inviting people into our homes. Hosting is a dying art, but play dates are a far more low-effort way to do this than throwing a candlelit dinner party. Inviting over another mom can be both low-cost and lower-effort, while strengthening those socialization muscles. Less “let’s meet for coffee” and catching up in seconds-long spurts while you chase a toddler around a decidedly un-childproofed cafe. More “come over for coffee” while you chat together on a couch in your basement playroom.
The key to combating motherhood loneliness is to turn your home into a place where socialization happens. Homes used to be social environments. Neighbors stopped in to borrow a cup of brown sugar and ended up chatting for an hour. The mail lady was a familiar face you looked forward to seeing every day on her rounds. After-church catch-ups migrated to homes for the afternoon back when parishioners lived near one another. Home-bound socialization doesn’t happen organically, but moms who are serious about curing the loneliness epidemic have to become the inviters in their communities to bring it back. Socialization should not be something that only happens when you leave the house.
Connect with your church
The burden of solving the loneliness epidemic should not fall exclusively on an already tired and overextended mother. Churches have a unique role to play in all this. They are well-placed to facilitate meaningful connections between like-minded moms in a general geographical area. My church hosts a morning Bible study with child care during the winter at a time ideal for most nap schedules. Others host mom walking collectives or small groups in kid-friendly locations with kid-friendly activities. A mom with the room to spare can host a low-pressure play date. Park meet-ups can happen at regular times during the week. But the point is, churches can do most of the planning and facilitating and let the moms take that first step to avoid sinking into loneliness.
Reigniting an informal social life in motherhood won’t be easy for everyone, especially in our isolated society. But restoring the casual in-home invite is one low-pressure and low-cost way to begin building a community that understands the challenges of moms, especially those who stay at home all day with their children.
***
Sarah Wilder is a visiting fellow at Independent Women and contributor for IW Features.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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A Mother’s Case For Bringing Parental Socialization Back

church

covid19 pandemic

loneliness

stay at home mom

When she was 22 years old, Gloria Steinem had an abortion. Looking back, she said that moment was pivotal in her life. The young Ms. Steinem believed that bearing a child – and getting married – would have radically narrowed the possibilities of her life. Earlier this year, she told an interviewer that at the time she saw marriage and children “not as a beginning but as an end.” When she wrote her memoir in 2015, Steinem <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/opinion/gloria-steinem-feminism-abortion.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/opinion/gloria-steinem-feminism-abortion.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077730000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2vnqpYq_nD4MkHKGPEVISL">dedicated</a> it to the doctor who performed the abortion, writing what he had asked of her: “You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.” For Ms. Steinem, children were constricting, incompatible with the life of freedom she desired.
Although almost 70 years have passed since Steinem turned her back on motherhood in 1957, many American women continue to believe that motherhood in the United States is unfairly burdensome. Simultaneous with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-real-legacy-of-gloria-steinem">Steinem’s death</a>, newspaper headlines have been focused on a murder trial in Massachusetts, in which Lindsay Clancy has been charged with killing her three young children. While the main issue in the trial is whether Clancy’s mental state was so impaired that she cannot be held criminally responsible for their deaths, debate over the case has turned into a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-tiktok-sleuths-turned-a-horrific-child-killing-into-a-twisted-online-soap-opera">flashpoint on social media</a> for how American mothers perceive pregnancy, the postpartum period, and the task of raising young children. Without weighing in on the outcome in the Clancy trial, it is clear that part of the reason the case has struck such a nerve is that many mothers in the United States <a href="https://www.wgbh.org/news/health/2026-08-28/why-the-lindsay-clancy-trial-has-energized-maternal-mental-health-advocates" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wgbh.org/news/health/2026-08-28/why-the-lindsay-clancy-trial-has-energized-maternal-mental-health-advocates&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2205UNNeuvabONlerbr4Lx">feel isolated and unsupported</a> after the birth of a child.
Is it inevitable that motherhood be popularly viewed as limiting or constricting, preventing a woman from fully living the life she chooses? In the seven decades between when Steinem made her choice to end her pregnancy and today, why has there been so little cultural movement on how we popularly perceive motherhood?
Understanding and answering that question is vital as America stares down a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/17/is-us-fertility-at-an-all-time-low-it-depends-how-you-measure-it/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/17/is-us-fertility-at-an-all-time-low-it-depends-how-you-measure-it/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2Uueeme8wG4-2tjZrw_n-O">historically low fertility rate</a> and a population structure that is skewing ever older. When Steinem began her push for “women’s lib” in the 1970s, population decline and declining rates of motherhood were viewed as a positive. In a famous essay, &#8220;<a href="https://time.com/5795657/gloria-steinem-womens-liberation-progress/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://time.com/5795657/gloria-steinem-womens-liberation-progress/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1rLhrHetfVvy5OwCXMMUe6">What It Would Be Like If Women Win</a>,&#8221; Steinem wrote approvingly that the “population explosion dictates that childbearing be kept to a minimum.” She would later <a href="https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/we-come-to-feminism-in-different-ways-gloria-steinem-on-a-lifetime-of-travels" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/we-come-to-feminism-in-different-ways-gloria-steinem-on-a-lifetime-of-travels&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0krKQxg9Nnm79eZJmS9IO6">worry in public</a> about the connection between overpopulation and environmental degradation.
Sixty years later, it is hard to be so sanguine about dramatic population decline. From other countries with even more catastrophic population decline than the U.S., <a href="https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2025-07-14/the-people-deficit-what-happens-when-depopulation-becomes-a-crisis" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2025-07-14/the-people-deficit-what-happens-when-depopulation-becomes-a-crisis&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3C3iKJoeMzn5qgOgYGE6gs">we know</a> that it may result in loss of economic productivity, as well as what journalist David Martin Davies calls “the erosion of communities and cultural continuity.”
For Steinem, and many of her second-wave feminist contemporaries, motherhood itself was often viewed as a method of oppression. Radical feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone famously wrote in her 1970 book, &#8220;The Dialectic of Sex,&#8221; “The heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.”
As some of the fervor around the Clancy trial shows, there is a through line from that line of thinking popularized in the &#8217;70s to discussion around motherhood today. And indeed, it isn’t limited to those headlines. The &#8220;childfree&#8221; Reddit group has 1.6 million subscribers, with countless posts lauding the freedom of living without children and the sacrifice inherent to parenting.
In 2020, Steinem was asked if she regretted not having children. &#8220;Not for a millisecond,&#8221; <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2026/09/03/gloria-steinem-christian-bale-married-children/91590602007/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2026/09/03/gloria-steinem-christian-bale-married-children/91590602007/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw32LJsk57g0S07WIcAfd97c">she replied</a>. To be clear, there are indeed many ways to live a vibrant, flourishing life without being married or having children. However, the fact that we did not manage, over the course of Steinem’s lifetime, to shift the narrative much around motherhood, women’s independence, and freedom is its own form of national tragedy.
It is not inevitable that motherhood be understood primarily in terms of the resulting burdens and sacrifice. Having and raising babies does, of course, require significant commitment and indeed sometimes requires significant personal sacrifice. However, it can also throw open many doors. To <a href="https://thehomefront.substack.com/p/reasons-to-have-babies" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thehomefront.substack.com/p/reasons-to-have-babies&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0nWlUKMPDkbJ7be9jza8vp">list</a> just a few: Having children can provide a tangible link to both past and future generations and provides a clear mechanism to pass something real on into the future. Pregnancy and babies can also expand your focus in life away from work and toward your family and community, and also keep you connected through old age with younger generations.
Popular perceptions about how motherhood can actually expand your horizons (not solely limit them) would probably be dramatically boosted if there was more social, cultural, and political commitment to decreasing the burdens of young moms. Putting aside the terrible tragedy of the Clancy case, it is an indisputable fact that many new moms in America feel isolated and alone and are in desperate need of more support from their extended families, neighbors, religious institutions, and local governments.
In short, both Steinem’s passing and the furor over the Clancy trial should serve as a reminder that we still have significant work to do around how motherhood is perceived in the United States. In the 1970s, women rightfully resented not being able to own personal bank accounts, receive mortgages from many banks, or work without facing serious sexual harassment and a host of other injustices. Somehow, however, many of those rightfully dedicated to fixing those issues successfully tore down our positive vision of motherhood as well — a problem still not fixed today. We have much work in front of us to build a vision of being a mom that shows it opens doors, not just closes them.
***
Ivana Greco has several jobs, but her favorite is being a homeschooling mom of four.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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How We Taught Women To Fear Motherhood

feminism

fertility rate

gloria steinem

lindsay clancy

opinion

There are a lot of conservative companies that love to talk about family. Have children. Have more children. Motherhood matters. Family comes first. Children are a blessing, not a burden.
I agree with all of it. But after working for one of the biggest conservative news organizations in the country, I learned there can be a pretty enormous difference between preaching those values and actually practicing them.
I know this because, before I had children, I was part of the problem. Then I became a mom. Suddenly, I understood what it felt like to worry that your child might make a noise during a Zoom call. I knew the panic of trying to work while also being a mother, terrified that someone might decide the two couldn&#8217;t coexist.
At my former workplace, working mothers were talked about in a negative light if their children appeared on Zoom or if they were caught working from a laptop at the playground while their kids played during the summer. Imagine that for a second. A mother isn&#8217;t skipping work. She&#8217;s literally sitting at the playground doing her job, laptop open, while simultaneously making sure her children have a summer. That was a problem.
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One former colleague was frequently working from her laptop while caring for her children. She was pushed out. There may have been fine print and official explanations surrounding her departure, but I was told by very senior people involved that her inability to secure childcare was at the heart of the problem. So much for practicing what you preach.
Then there was maternity leave. When I had my first child, she suffered several health issues during her first three months of life. I was a brand-new mother trying to navigate doctors, sleepless nights, and the overwhelming realization that this tiny human depended entirely on me. And I was contacted about work. Numerous times. On maternity leave. Instead of being allowed to focus entirely on my newborn, I had work stress hanging over me too.
Fast-forward to today, and I&#8217;m writing this with my baby sitting on my lap. I now work at The Daily Wire, and I&#8217;ve never felt more empowered to be a working mother. If I need to step away to feed my baby, nobody interrogates me. If I need to take my kids somewhere or give them some one-on-one time, I can do it. I&#8217;m not made to feel guilty about it. In fact, it&#8217;s encouraged.
And here&#8217;s something that might surprise people: One of my biggest advocates for putting motherhood first isn&#8217;t another mother.
It&#8217;s my direct report. A father. Imagine that. A man who can celebrate the work I do while also celebrating the fact that I&#8217;m a mom. He doesn&#8217;t treat motherhood as an inconvenience he has to work around. He reminds me that it&#8217;s more important than anything happening on a homepage that day.
I&#8217;ve been told numerous times that nothing I do at work will ever be more important than being a mother. And here&#8217;s the funny thing: That mentality doesn&#8217;t make me want to work less. It makes me want to work harder.
I realized that one morning at 2 a.m. I woke up to feed my baby and, like any exhausted mom, planned to get him back to sleep right after, and hopefully get myself back to sleep too. Then I looked at my phone. Senator Lindsey Graham had tragically and unexpectedly died. Suddenly, there was major breaking news to cover. So when the baby finished eating, I didn&#8217;t go back to sleep. I grabbed my laptop and got to work. And strangely enough, I felt blessed.
There I was in the middle of the night, exhausted, with my baby next to me, and I got to be the person awake to cover one of the biggest stories of the day while most Americans were still sleeping. I wasn&#8217;t annoyed that I had to work. I wasn&#8217;t frustrated that I was awake. I felt lucky that being a mom was the reason I happened to be awake when my team needed someone.
Nobody told me to cover breaking news at 2 a.m. I wasn&#8217;t scared of what would happen if I didn&#8217;t. I did it because I wanted to. And that difference means everything.
My colleagues have been a blessing from God, too. I&#8217;m surrounded by mothers whose children are older than mine, women who have already survived the sleepless nights and toddler meltdowns I&#8217;m living through right now. They check in on me. They remind me I&#8217;m not alone. And they make sure I know that when motherhood feels overwhelming, I have women around me who have been there and are ready to listen.
Recently, I had an absolutely brutal night with both of my kids. I woke up exhausted and defeated and happened to see a tweet about postpartum struggles from a coworker. She hadn&#8217;t written it for me. She probably had no idea I needed it. But I did. Her words pulled me up that morning more than she&#8217;ll ever know. I sent her a message to thank her for being so real and told her that what she&#8217;d written was exactly what I needed to get out of bed and keep going that day.
&#8220;If you ever need a mom to chat with give me a call!!&#8221; she told me.
Now that her children are older, she can look back and see what can be nearly impossible to see when you&#8217;re in the trenches with little kids. The sacrifices were worth it. Sometimes that&#8217;s exactly what another mom needs to hear.
And maybe the biggest difference between my two workplaces can be summed up by something as simple as a child wandering into the camera. At my old job, I would panic if my four-year-old made a sound during a Zoom call. I would find myself getting angry with her for being a completely normal four-year-old because I was scared of how my managers would react and did react if it happened. 
Think about how backwards that is.
At The Daily Wire, when my colleague Tim Rice had one of his young children climb onto his lap during a live appearance on &#8220;Wired In,&#8221; nobody freaked out. Host Cabot Phillips celebrated it.
&#8220;We practice what we preach,&#8221; Cabot said. &#8220;At the Daily Wire we love children.&#8221; He called children &#8220;a gift&#8221; and &#8220;a blessing from God.&#8221;
That moment stuck with me. A toddler climbed onto Dad&#8217;s lap while Dad was working, and everyone kept going. Nobody shooed the child away. Nobody acted embarrassed. Nobody treated being a parent like some unprofessional secret that needed to be hidden from the audience. That&#8217;s what being pro-family actually looks like.
Being a working mother shouldn&#8217;t require pretending that you stop being a mother between 9 and 5. Children make noise. Babies need to be fed. School closes. Babysitters cancel. Kids wander into Zoom calls. That&#8217;s life.
A company can put &#8220;family values&#8221; in a mission statement. It can publish a thousand articles about the importance of motherhood. But you learn what an organization actually believes when a baby cries during a meeting.
For years, I thought being a great employee meant making sure nobody could see that I was also a mom. Now I work somewhere that has taught me the exact opposite. I don&#8217;t have to choose. Being given the freedom to put my children first has made me more dedicated to my career than I&#8217;ve ever been.
The Daily Wire gave me my family life back. And in doing so, it made me enjoy working again. Every day I wake up thankful that I get to be part of this mission without sacrificing the most important mission I&#8217;ll ever have: being a mom.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

D6CCF4C6-01A7-457F-943F-F5D19877AF50

The Choice Working Mothers Should Never Have To Make

family values

the daily wire

working mother

workplace culture

Not every woman is destined to become a biological mother. That doesn&#8217;t mean she can&#8217;t embody the essence of one through sacrifice, nurturing, humor, wisdom, and grace. Every woman carries a God-given piece of that inside her, whether or not she ever has a child of her own to raise. Dolly Parton, who never gave birth, spent her life proving it.
Born January 19, 1946, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/dolly-parton-dead-at-80">in a one-room cabin</a> on Locust Ridge in East Tennessee, Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth of 12 children. Her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. She recorded her first single, &#8220;Puppy Love,&#8221; at 13, and the morning after her high school graduation in 1964, she packed her belongings in paper grocery bags and left for Nashville. She never left her family behind, though. Loyalty to her kin and her hometown was evident in everything she did afterward.
Early in her 58-year marriage to Carl Thomas Dean, Parton tried to get pregnant. By 1978, at 32, she&#8217;d changed her mind. &#8220;We don&#8217;t want children of our own,&#8221; she <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/809748900103018/">told</a> the BBC. &#8220;We don&#8217;t want the total responsibility.&#8221; At the time, she had five younger siblings who had lived with her already.
In 1982, Parton had to cancel a tour due to abdominal pain and bleeding. She was later diagnosed with endometriosis. This medical condition involves tissue that is similar to the lining of your uterus growing where it isn’t supposed to. It can cause infertility and extreme pain.
Shortly afterward, Parton underwent a partial hysterectomy and learned that having children would be impossible. She&#8217;d go on to say, in various interviews over the following decades, that she never felt a &#8220;burning&#8221; pull toward motherhood the way some women do.
But despite her words, she still maintained a wistfulness on the subject. &#8220;I would have been a great mother, I think,&#8221; she <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/06/dolly-parton-more-to-me-than-big-hair-phoney-stuff">told</a> the Guardian in 2014. &#8220;I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would&#8217;ve felt guilty about that, if I&#8217;d have left them [to work or tour]. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn&#8217;t have been a star.&#8221; 
She and her beloved husband Carl even picked out a name — Carla, if they had a girl — before deciding not to become parents.
What she chose instead was to mother everyone else&#8217;s children. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t have children because I believed that God didn&#8217;t mean for me to have kids so everybody&#8217;s kids could be mine, so I could do things like Imagination Library,&#8221; Parton said during an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/dollysimaginationlibrary/videos/2696343797293710/">interview</a> with Oprah Winfrey in 2020. 
In 1988, she launched the Dollywood Foundation to support educational achievement in her home county, and in 1995 the foundation introduced the Imagination Library, a program that mails free books to children no matter their income level. What started as a local effort in East Tennessee grew into a global literacy initiative. The organization would eventually ship more than 200 million books to children across five countries.
There&#8217;s a version of the childless life that&#8217;s become massively popular online. These are women who talk about not having kids because they want to travel, buy nice clothes, make more money, and never be tied down. Parton&#8217;s version did include fame and success by any measure, but it never came at the expense of thinking of others. 
&#8220;We take care of a lot of other people&#8217;s kids,&#8221; the “Jolene” singer told Rolling Stone in 2003. &#8220;We buy new cars for all the nieces and nephews that graduate, we send any to college that want to go.&#8221;
That maternal instinct reached well past her own family, too. When rapper Eminem was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside her in 2022, Parton wrote him a letter afterward since the two never got the chance to meet in person. 
&#8220;Even though I don&#8217;t know a lot about rap music, I&#8217;ve come to know that you are the very best at it,&#8221; she wrote, adding that she&#8217;d always felt an unexplained connection to him. Eminem <a href="https://x.com/Eminem/status/2092367272891310482">posted</a> the letter on X after her death. &#8220;She definitely didn&#8217;t have to take the time to do it,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;Even for a kid who mostly listened to rap music, she was an icon. A superstar in every sense.&#8221;
To the family she did have, she was something closer to an actual mother, just one generation removed. Her nieces and nephews called her Aunt Granny and GeeGee while Carl was referred to as Uncle PeePaw. 
&#8220;I grew up in a big old family with eight kids younger than me, and several of my brothers and sisters came to live with me early on in my life,&#8221; she <a href="https://people.com/country/dolly-parton-on-kids-family-members/">told</a> People Country in 2014. &#8220;I&#8217;ve loved their kids just like they&#8217;re my grandkids, and now I&#8217;ve got great-grandkids.&#8221; 
She made similar statements more than once over the years because it was simply true of how she lived. Not having kids of her own never stopped her from mothering the ones around her.
Parton had her own theory for why kids gravitated toward her. &#8220;I think kids relate to me because they think of me like a Mother Goose or a Fairy Godmother,&#8221; she said. &#8220;I&#8217;m like a cartoon character — my voice is little, and I&#8217;m an excitable little person like them! I&#8217;m very childlike in that way, in my nature.&#8221;
Parton leaves behind no biological children. But for childless women, she remains a wonderful example of how to exude a mothering spirit without ever giving birth. For Parton, it was about sacrifice, giving, and a pureness of heart that everyone could plainly see. 
She leaves behind a hundred million-plus free books mailed to kids who needed them, a foundation still funding education in her home county, nieces and nephews who called her Granny, and a rapper who never met her but still felt uplifted by a letter. What a legacy.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton Never Had Kids. She Still Exemplified Motherhood.

dolly parton

dollywood foundation

eminem

imagination library

TikTok Parents

It’s Time To Mansplain Parenting To TikTok Moms Who Resent Their Own Kids

social media

tiktok

Postpartum depression is getting its 15 minutes of fame. But this complicated disorder demands more than a glance when the stakes are life and death.
Following actor Hayden Panettiere’s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/actress-hayden-panetierre-dead-at-36">death</a> on Sunday, reports of a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hayden-panettieres-story-shines-a-light-on-motherhoods-darkest-struggle">broken contract</a> with Neutrogena resurfaced, triggering new calls to boycott the skincare brand. Panettiere had claimed the skincare giant severed ties with her after she went public about her struggle with postpartum depression (PPD).
“There’s a lot of people out there who think that it’s not real, that it’s not true, that it’s something that’s made up in their mind,” Panettiere revealed on “<a href="https://youtu.be/Lpp0Lc1q3mA?t=507">Live With Kelly and Michael</a>” in 2015. She said she identified with her character Juliette Barnes’ postpartum depression storyline that aired on “Nashville” in season 3 the same year. 
“It’s really painful, and it’s really scary, and women need a lot of support. We do something that no man can do on this planet. We grow a human being in our bodies.” 
The live audience erupted in validating applause. Panettiere had just given birth to her daughter, <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-moms/news/inside-hayden-panettieres-relationship-with-daughter-kaya/">Kaya</a>, in December 2014. She would later relinquish custody to her ex-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko when the couple split in 2018, amid Panettiere’s battle with PPD and substance addiction.
Panettiere had been in a decade-long contract with Neutrogena that began when she was a teen. She recalled in her autobiography “<a href="https://www.aol.com/articles/biggest-bombshells-hayden-panettiere-book-110000000.html?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9jaGF0Z3B0LmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAARj0SFg1y7CT9-kbKuO_O0lpS-t2eh2g1-Nv3WvS3xu-SqJcoIfOuhGPMWW9j6Cv9KOLAEnfsm5Q1-sM13sLMJ8H921orH6z3ZgBCOJteueiAFpwJBpvhX8HFBOcO1xhSNoOePGQoGplOyra7sta8KRRc4T981WZah8VkrL_s3X">This Is Me: A Reckoning</a>,” released in May, “My relationship with Neutrogena helped dictate every outfit I wore, every hair and makeup choice, and how I acted when I was out on the town. I never let the paparazzi see me holding a drink — underage Neutrogena girls didn’t do that — and while I didn’t force myself to dress modestly, I never showed too much skin.”
“They have morals clauses which had a huge impact on my life,” Panettiere told the “<a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/Xm6VxeD-ydU?si=XUBSxl0av-QHHqXc">On Purpose With Jay Shetty</a>” podcast on May 11. “I was a teenager, and I had all the paparazzi around me catching all these gory moments… every cigarette that I smoked or bad outfit… This was the last thing that I thought they would ever fire me over.” 
When the topic of PPD “just came up” on “Live,” Panettiere said she was “just being honest” about her experience and didn’t think twice about possible fallout regarding her brand deal. “I got that call that Neutrogena wanted to fire me over that, and my representative at the time said, ‘That’s illegal. You can’t do that.’” The brand ultimately ended her contract.
Panettiere didn’t show the receipts, but a morals clause is common in agreements between major brands and celebrity spokespeople. “This lets the company terminate the deal immediately if the spokesperson does something to sully their public image,” intellectual property attorney <a href="https://www.wnj.com/updates/morals-clauses-spokespeople-and-social-media/">Brian D. Wassom</a> explains. “[It] can put quite severe restrictions on the spokesperson&#8217;s behavior. But from the company&#8217;s perspective, it&#8217;s simply protecting their investment.”
For the record, Neutrogena seemingly had no trouble sullying its moral reputation when it partnered with trans-identifying influencer <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@neutrogena_us/video/7108023250201906478">Dylan Mulvaney</a> for a social media promo in 2022. Mulvaney declared his pronouns as “she/they” and proceeded to splash himself with water until mascara ran from his eyes, and his white cropped tank top got so wet it was nearly transparent. 
But, according to Panettiere, a candid discussion about the realities of actual women and motherhood was a bridge too far. Neutrogena’s parent company Kenvue did not respond to The Daily Wire&#8217;s request for comment. 
“I knew if I was gonna do this, I wanted to rip the Band-Aid off, and I wanted to be completely, brutally, painfully honest,” Panettiere told <a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/zFCn-I4SFoY?si=SWZWa-4m89M3VTlI">Us Weekly</a> at the time. “When I was honest about [postpartum depression] and came out, the repercussions were shocking and had such a negative impact on my life. But at the same time had such a positive impact on other people’s lives who had been through it. It’s one of those topics that has so much stigma around it.” 
Supporters of the late actor now claim they’re done with the beauty brand. Social posts read: “<a href="https://x.com/OscarJack65/status/2089322895772103088?s=20">I will never buy Neutrogena as long as I live</a>,” “<a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DcOXCknOZIO/">Every Neutrogena product in my house went in the trash</a>,” and “<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DcJdDRNSB6n/">Neutrogena, you will BURN to the ground for what you did to Hayden</a>.”
Just over a decade after Panettiere first spoke out, PPD — a disorder that affects <a href="https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9312-postpartum-depression">one in seven women</a> — remains a stain on the myth of the perfect mother. Caring for a newborn is a full-time job. And we’re over here acting like it’s no big thing to expect mom to fix breakfast, pack scratch-made lunches, bathe and dress a handful of young kids, prep dinner, gas up the car, post a viral #GetReadyWithMe on her socials, and make it to the office for a promotion-worthy presentation by 7 a.m.
Despite increasing cultural awareness of PPD, some still question its validity, preferring to brush it off as falling under the normal stress of a newborn or the reformation of a formerly selfish parent — not an actual clinical diagnosis. 
Accused killer Lindsay Clancy’s trial shed a blinding light on the brutal reality of what her defense claims is the much rarer <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-terrible-truth-about-the-lindsay-clancy-case">postpartum psychosis</a>. Had she gotten the treatment and support she needed, perhaps her children could have lived to see their mother recover. 
Reproductive psychobiologist <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hI28SJIAAAAJ&amp;hl=en">Dr. Jen Hahn-Holbrook</a>, an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced, is one of the world’s leading experts on postpartum depression. And she says Panettiere’s history of trauma pointed to PPD from the jump.
“The postpartum period is a time when women are especially vulnerable to all mental health conditions actually — especially depression, but also anxiety and OCD,” she told The Daily Wire. “Basically, if you have any predispositions towards mental illness, it’s a perfect storm.”
“There are these huge transitions. You&#8217;ve got this giant hormone withdrawal, which does affect a lot of women in terms of their mood. And then on top of that, you have sleep disturbances. You&#8217;re up all night with a crying baby. And then you&#8217;ve got the relationship changes. You&#8217;ve got a brand new baby, someone to care for, and so many more responsibilities. You&#8217;re trying to juggle it all with a marriage … your whole life is just [one] giant upheaval.”
Her research suggests that global statistics lean more toward one in five women experiencing PPD, and that “80% of women report some type of mood disturbance,” or the kind of mild depression people refer to as “baby blues.” It can hit anyone at any income level, anywhere in the world.
She says of cases like Panettiere’s, “It is more common in people who don&#8217;t have a supportive partner. Obviously, if they have any mental health conditions, like drug use, addiction, anxiety, depression, a history of trauma… it just exacerbates any underlying vulnerabilities.” 
Board-certified OB-GYN <a href="https://aaplog.org/speakers-bureau/dr-christina-francis/">Dr. Christina Francis</a>, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), suggests that in order for the stigma around PPD to change, communities are responsible for pitching in to help new moms and taking the conversation on PPD out into the streets.
“One of the best things that we can do is have more of a public conversation about this,” she tells The Daily Wire. “So many women are told, ‘Oh, it&#8217;s just postpartum. It&#8217;s going to go away. It&#8217;s going to get better.’ What we need to be doing is allowing women&#8217;s voices to be heard and really discussing the support that women really need. I think research into women&#8217;s health in general tends to be underfunded, and I think more focus on non-pharmaceutical interventions could be done.”
“We do see that babies’ outcomes are worse if mom has untreated severe postpartum depression. So not only are we improving Mom&#8217;s life and her extended family&#8217;s life if we can get her through this and out of this, but we&#8217;re impacting her baby&#8217;s health as well.”
As for the best chance of postpartum success, the constant refrain is support. A new mother needs the support of people who know her and can recognize the changing signs of depression. Slight shifts could be as subtle as not responding to her baby’s cry. But Dr. Francis assures mothers that even with a solid support system in place, “This is not a failure on your part.”
“This is 100% addressable,&#8221; she says. &#8220;You reaching out and saying that you need help actually shows that you&#8217;re actively advocating for yourself and for your baby.” 
She also notes the relief in looking toward the light at the end of the tunnel. “This is going to be a limited, defined period of time in your life,” she says. “Even though it seems really overwhelming and really hard right now, and it is, know that there&#8217;s going to be an end to this. We are here to walk with you and get you through this until you get to that point where it gets better. Sometimes I think just knowing in our minds that there&#8217;s going to be an end is helpful.” 
Maybe Panettiere reignited a conversation we needed to have. In the pages of <a href="https://ew.com/hayden-panettiere-terrified-new-book-release-exclusive-11972447">her book</a>, she offered a gentle reminder: “All you want to know is that somebody else has gone through and survived what you&#8217;re going through.”
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Hayden Panettiere’s Story Shines A Light On Motherhood’s Darkest Struggle

hayden panettiere

neutrogena

postpartum depression

When I talk publicly about how raising my baby is beautiful, not oppressive, feminists get mad. We never said that! they claim. To that I can only ask, Have you read second-wave feminist literature? Second-wave feminists did, in fact, call motherhood oppressive.
And ever since the &#8217;60s, the media&#8217;s advertising for the role hasn&#8217;t been particularly good. Culture followed the feminists&#8217; lead by portraying motherhood in an unfavorable light — both in obvious and more subtle ways. The prevailing messages always seem to reiterate the same point: Having children will ruin your life and strip you of your freedom forever.
It&#8217;s just as evident in today&#8217;s media as it was decades ago. While on maternity leave, I started watching three different shows. Each one introduced a pregnancy storyline, and in every case, the female lead chose to abort her baby. For one, it wasn&#8217;t the right time. For another, it would ruin her career. For the third, she wouldn&#8217;t be able to attend her dream school.
The state of modern television is just one of the many examples of the oppressive messaging that still permeates the media. Motherhood is portrayed as such a terrible fate that it is presented as better to terminate the life of your baby than to become a mother. As a new mom, holding my sleeping baby, I turned off each of those shows. The juxtaposition between what the media was telling me and what I was actually experiencing was striking.
Motherhood has far exceeded my already high expectations. Looking at my son&#8217;s face, I couldn&#8217;t find the oppression. It unlocked a million new horizons — new highs and even new lows — but most importantly, it brought a precious new human being into my life, one I have the privilege of raising and calling my own. There is no &#8220;sentence&#8221; more beautiful than that.
So, from my nursery rocking chair, I recorded a simple video on social media saying so.
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Since then, women have made their own videos highlighting moments from their lives as mothers using my video’s audio, while another corner of the internet has taken personal offense. Many feminists responded with videos declaring, &#8220;We never said that.&#8221; That&#8217;s odd because I didn&#8217;t even use the word feminist. But perhaps they recognized that the language I criticized did, in fact, stem from their movement.
&#8220;They&#8221; did, in fact, say that.
It wasn&#8217;t difficult to dive into feminist literature from the 1960s and 1970s and find numerous direct quotes from influential figures saying that motherhood is oppressive. Shulamith Firestone wrote in her 1970 book &#8220;The Dialectic of Sex,&#8221; &#8220;The heart of a woman&#8217;s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.&#8221;
Other notable examples include quotes from prominent feminist writers equating fetuses to parasites and describing domestic life as &#8220;comfortable concentration camps.&#8221; The list goes on and on, so much so that I made an entire video outlining my findings.
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Perhaps one takeaway from the current outrage is that many people are no longer reading the rhetoric of their movement&#8217;s icons from decades ago. Or perhaps they want to distance themselves from their more radical predecessors and present a more peaceful picture of what their movement represents.
Probably not, but one can hope. Considering that the modern feminist movement still celebrates what I view as one of the most heinous practices in the United States, I doubt it. It always comes back to abortion.
For a movement to justify such an act, motherhood must still be portrayed, directly or indirectly, as oppression. Only if motherhood is seen as a fate worse than death does the argument for ending an unborn child&#8217;s life become coherent (though still deeply flawed). They may not say it as bluntly anymore, but I believe the core tenets from sexual revolution authors to modern-day influencers remain the same.
As for me, I&#8217;ll stick with another message for the masses: Motherhood is the most important role I will ever have, and it is not oppression. Motherhood is simply the best.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-464447213

The Cultural Lie That Turned Motherhood Into A Burden

abortion

children

upstream

There’s a new TikTok trend making headlines, and it’s all about moms smoking weed to survive taking care of their children.
They call themselves “garden moms.” Parents are calling pot a coping mechanism, describing their drug habits with zero shame. As the barriers to accessing marijuana crumble nationwide, with multiple states legalizing the drug both for medical and recreational use, users are bringing their daily use into the mainstream.
The Atlantic’s Sarah Levy recently <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/06/gardening-moms-weed-parenting/687518/">reported</a> that she found about 76,000 videos under the #gardenmom hashtag. She interviewed an influencer named Taylor Mitchem, who has 120,000 followers and started smoking pot daily when her son was two and a half. Her reasoning was simple: &#8220;If you can have something that can take the edge off a little bit, why not?&#8221;
There have been enough articles about the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-high-cost-of-getting-high-how-legal-weed-is-destroying-a-generation">pitfalls of legalized marijuana</a>, and it’s not worth rehashing that argument here. But one of the most interesting aspects of the phenomenon isn’t specific to weed. It’s the larger issue of why these moms feel the need to escape their children in the first place.
In this case, the stigma isn&#8217;t just around the substance. It’s more about admitting out loud that you find your own children exhausting enough to need daily relief from them, whether that comes in the form of wine, weed, or whatever the next thing is. A cute hashtag can’t hide that basic truth.
Before the garden moms — also referred to as “cannamoms” — there were the wine moms who bragged that “Mommy’s sippy cup” was a stemless tumbler filled with chardonnay. Decades ago, there was Valium (“mother’s little helper”), and even before that it was the tranquilizer Miltown, which Levy noted was often prescribed to housewives in the 1950s for anxiety.
For years, women have been coming up with ways to manipulate their minds to cope with the stress of motherhood. Weed is the latest vehicle. It’s not likely to be the last.
And the weed mom trend isn’t new, either. Motherly <a href="https://www.mother.ly/health-wellness/self-care/cannabis-use-in-motherhood-rise-of-cannamoms/">ran</a> &#8220;High on Motherhood: The Rise of Cannamoms&#8221; back in 2024, quoting a mom named Susie who said weed gave her &#8220;the sweetest, most engaged moments&#8221; with her daughter while high. Writer Jamilah Lemieux <a href="https://www.romper.com/life/moms-who-smoke-weed">told</a> Romper the same year she thinks cannabis is headed toward the same social status as alcohol: &#8220;widely available, legal, and socially acceptable.&#8221; ABC News was <a href="https://abcnews.com/GMA/Family/weed-moms-wine-moms/story?id=66184880">asking</a> &#8220;Are weed moms the new wine moms?&#8221; back in 2019. Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician at Columbia, told the network she&#8217;s watched it happen in her own practice: more parents turning to cannabis products to &#8220;take the edge off&#8221; of ordinary life.
Advocates often frame smoking weed as an enhancement to parenting rather than an outright escape. &#8220;I got high so I could be more patient&#8221; sounds a lot better than &#8220;I got high because I wanted to feel good,&#8221; even when the outcome is identical. And the outcome matters. Levy cites Kirby Deater-Deckard, a psychology professor at UMass Amherst, on how being chemically mellow slows your reaction time in an actual emergency. A relaxed parent isn&#8217;t necessarily a present one, and one who is overly calm could be dangerous if she needs to act quickly.
I&#8217;ve watched this shift happen in my own circle. Lately, weed is more prevalent, and, what’s worse, it’s a little too convenient. Ten years ago, getting high took effort: find a dealer, roll a joint, smell like a skunk, hide the paraphernalia from a toddler who notices everything. Also, it was mostly illegal back then. That kept a lot of would-be users from even trying. 
Then came the THC gummies. They have no smoke, no smell, no complicated rituals. Because of the convenience, they’re showing up in places where White Claws used to dominate. 
But there are still problems. This form makes it easier to lose track of how much you&#8217;ve had, and edibles are notoriously easy to over-consume. Romper reported that accidental child exposure to THC edibles has spiked over 1,300% in five years, which makes sense considering that they’re packaged like fruit snacks. The format that made cannabis more parent-friendly also made it harder to notice when &#8220;taking the edge off&#8221; has turned into being zoned out for several hours.
What almost none of this pro-weed content mentions is what happens when &#8220;a little bit&#8221; becomes a habit that&#8217;s not easy to quit. Slate writer Sammi LaBue <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2026/06/weed-health-cannabis-disorder-scromiting.html">described</a> developing cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome after prolonged marijuana smoking. This involved a condition of violent vomiting tied to long-term regular use, nicknamed &#8220;scromiting&#8221; for the screaming that often accompanies it. 
Alice Moon, a cannabis industry veteran, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/03/13/alice-moon-chs/">developed CHS</a> herself after years of regular use. It took two years and several doctors before anyone diagnosed her because the condition wasn&#8217;t well understood yet. 
You won&#8217;t find any of that in the #gardenmom clips. What you&#8217;ll find is a promise: a calmer, gentler version of parenting, one that doesn&#8217;t yell over spilled milk. The harder part to justify is feeling the need to check out in the first place. 
Cannamoms did not discover a solution to stress-free parenting. They’re just repackaging the same escape mechanisms that, over time, were exposed for being cop-outs. Wine, weed, Valium: It’s all part of the same playbook that treats children like they need to be endured rather than enjoyed. 
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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How ‘Mommy Juice’ Got A Whole New Meaning

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Marijuana

Second Lady Usha Vance delivered a rare rebuke to The New York Times over an article essentially claiming that women within President Donald Trump&#8217;s administration were using maternity fashion to weaponize pregnancy.
Vance, who is pregnant with her fourth child with husband and Vice President JD Vance, mocked the outlet&#8217;s attempt to make her wardrobe political and made it clear that her maternity fashion choices were typically born of just three things: necessity, comfort, and economy.
&#8220;Now that we know the political significance of my $8.75 coral maternity dress from Old Navy, can’t wait to hear what the New York Times has to say about my elastic-waistband pants and compression socks!&#8221; Vance posted via X. &#8220;In the meantime, enjoy my pregnancy fashion (or lack thereof) and a good story with your kids on &#8216;Storytime with the Second Lady.'&#8221;
Along with her caption, Vance shared a video — also featuring the vice president — of herself wearing the dress in question as he read aloud from A. A. Milne&#8217;s classic, &#8220;Winnie the Pooh.&#8221;
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And here’s the receipt! <a href="https://t.co/tgICmpbapQ">pic.twitter.com/tgICmpbapQ</a>
— Second Lady Usha Vance (@SLOTUS) <a href="https://x.com/SLOTUS/status/2069857037303816372?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 24, 2026</a></blockquote>
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For good measure, Vance followed up with a screenshot of her receipt showing that she had, in fact, purchased the dress from Old Navy. It also showed that the coral-colored &#8220;Asymmetrical Shoulder Maxi Dress,&#8221; originally $49.99, had been marked down to $12.99 and she had saved an additional $3.74— making her final total $8.75.
And while that choice may have been one of convenience and economy, Vance said in March that being pregnant as the Second Lady of the United States meant that she necessarily had to change her style, mainly because her position dictated a number of events that she would have to attend — and many of those would not be held in places where leggings and sweatpants were considered appropriate.
&#8220;I have to dress up a lot more. I enjoyed my last pregnancy — there were a lot of sweatpants. I was working from home and sometimes put a blazer on over what was under,&#8221; she told NBC at the time.
The article to which Vance was responding was published on Wednesday and was titled, &#8220;The Politics and Power of the Pregnancy Image.&#8221; If that did not paint a clear enough picture of the tone, the sub-headline removed all doubt: &#8220;Usha Vance, along with Katie Miller and Karoline Leavitt, shows how much is said by an expectant silhouette, without anyone saying a word.&#8221;
The article proceeded to accuse women within the Trump administration of flaunting their pregnancies to make a political point: this is what women are supposed to do — and how they are supposed to look.
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Together, the women have created a notably consistent, and somewhat paradigm-shifting, picture of the White House’s family and fertility platform.
If the bare-chested, muscled mixed martial arts fighters of the U.F.C. match that President Trump hosted on Flag Day were the poster guys for MAGA’s image of masculinity, then the pregnant women of Trump world are one half of their feminine counterparts. Along with the sheath-clad, lip-filled, pageant-haired Mar-a-Lago set, they offer an image of idealized womanhood that gives literal shape to the pronatalist movement.
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Jill Filipovic, the host of the “<a class="css-yywogo" title="" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-week-in-women/id1632915204" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Week in Women</a>” podcast, suggested that even though it&#8217;s highly unlikely that the pregnancies were coordinated, the presentation appeared to be: &#8220;It almost feels like a memo went out. They have quite intentionally opted to present themselves as, ‘I am really pregnant, and this is what women were chosen to do,’ and they are happy to say that both with their looks and their mouths.”
Vance, quite clearly, said otherwise.
Miller, whose fourth child with longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller was born just days before Father&#8217;s Day, <a href="https://x.com/KatieMiller/status/2069874153717395901">weighed in</a> as well — and said that maternity fashion had been made more difficult as American birth rates had fallen.
&#8220;Over the last few years, many clothing brands have largely stopped producing maternity clothes that most women actually want to wear. @SLOTUS has done a phenomenal job curating affordable, fashionable options that make pregnancy fashion accessible. The root cause is sadly straightforward: with fewer women having babies, it’s likely become unprofitable for brands to invest in dedicated maternity lines,&#8221; she said.

Second Lady Fires Back After NYT Says Trump Admin’s Women Are Weaponizing Maternity Fashion

Usha Vance Takes Rare Swipe At Media Over Maternity Fashion

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This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
I grew up a &#8220;child on the margins,&#8221; a child of addicts and therefore a child of chaos. I had what I considered to be a normal life: school, dance, parents arguing, checking pulses, and praying the lights turned on. My parents loved me greatly, but their love was limited to what they knew. My parents’ addiction existed long before I did; it was no surprise that it stayed as I grew up. I learned to be the responsible one of the family.
When I was 14, we lost my dad to his addiction, and the last thread of our chaotic lives began to unravel. My mom and I became unprovided for and unprotected. We were helpless and homeless for three months. We begged, borrowed, and stole to get by. We wore every valuable possession we had left and stayed on guard. While we were homeless, my mom found friends more dangerous than the last few, and while she was in jail again, they turned on me and assaulted me. My dad’s death brought new extremes to my life that had only existed in nightmares.
When my mom was released from jail, we had a “new start.” I registered at a different school. But the cycle continued, and my mom went to jail again. This time it was different. The teachers, police officers, and caseworkers actually noticed me. They noticed not only that I was alone, but they also noticed me: my personality, preferences, and emotions. They wanted to know more and help me. As I began to trust them, I shared my trauma and memories with them and then with Harmony House Children’s Advocacy Center. This led to being placed in foster care.
In April 2020, I was placed with my foster family. With a simple hour-long drive and a duffel bag in the doorway, I was introduced to lively, fun, healthy, and joyful chaos, the type of chaos caused by happy children rather than unhappy adults. The family had two loving parents, five biological children, and one other foster child. They all stood and stared as they watched “the new kid,” eyes full of curiosity and compassion.
After much food, play, “trauma dumping,” and hibernation, just 12 days later, at age 15, I found out I was pregnant.
At this new place, I was separated from everything and everyone I knew, good and bad. I wondered how attached to this new life I could become. Even with every uncertainty, I became a mom in an instant. I thought, “It can’t be harder than raising my own mother.”
Though I was fearful, I knew that as a mother to my own child, I was responsible for him. Fearing the family’s reaction and judgment, I trembled and waited. I feared being kicked out and abandoned again. My foster mother noticed my anxiety. Instead of judging, putting me down, or kicking me out, she gently explained, “We will keep and love you and your baby if you’d like to stay. We are glad to raise you and your baby.”
Thankful to have such reassurance, I set off with her for my first ultrasound on May 1. That afternoon, my excitement disappeared when we went to my old house to get a few of my things for the baby and found my mother, who had overdosed.
In one year of my life, I became fatherless, homeless, assaulted, a foster child, a mom, and an orphan. Somehow, I dared to hope just one more time that this would be my last “new start.” I&#8217;ve learned you can be bitter or get better. I chose to settle into my new life and learn.
As I watched my foster family interact, I realized they did not live their everyday lives in fear, guilt, and shame. I wanted that life of love for my child and wondered how I could make it my son’s reality too. Later, God showed me the best way to have that life for him was to learn how to live it myself. I learned that my second mom and dad had their own problems and their own pasts, but they chose to live life together and to show love every day. I learned to hope, and my son became my inspiration. Hope became the reason I could choose life for not only my son, but for myself too.
Every mom has a story before motherhood with mixed feelings surrounding it. What matters is what we choose to do despite our baggage. My life today is beyond what I ever hoped for in my wonders or my worries. Daily, it is full of joyful chaos and full of love, structure, and consistency. Part of my daily life is YoungLives, a teen mom support group. We still meet several times a month, where I am reminded I am far from alone. I’ve been with YoungLives for five years now, and as I have grown into adulthood and welcomed a couple more children, I have become an example of what a little hope and resources can do.
Today, I am a friend and aid to other teenage mothers. As we sit around the supper table or play games, I get to listen to their joys and troubles, whether mundane or extreme. And because of the life I have lived, I can even relate to them. As they share, they may not realize that until I say something to the effect of, “I remember those times.” Many girls have responded with anger or disgust, but once I explain a bit about my story, they quickly realize that I was and still am one of them, just further down the line.
It is one of my greatest joys that when people look at me today, they do not see the pain and hurt of my past. Instead, they can see the love of a mother and friend. Today it is my choice and honor to get to share what a little hope can do.
***
 Angel Rassi is a Christian wife and stay-at-home mother of two children — with another on the way. She works with teen mothers and their families through Ohio Valley YoungLives.

Close-up of pregnant woman with hands her belly holding daisy

I Lost Everything. Then One Unexpected Pregnancy Changed My Future.

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
When I walked out of the IVF clinic for the last time, I didn&#8217;t have anywhere to go.
I had done everything a patient is supposed to do. For over a decade, I had lived what most people would call a low-tox life. I avoided polyester, BPA, and the endocrine disruptors hiding in everyday products. I paid attention to what I put in and on my body because I believe that our health is shaped by the small daily choices most people never think about. So when my husband and I struggled to conceive, I assumed I would walk into a fertility clinic, get answers, and find a path forward.
I tracked my cycles. I sat through the hormone panels, the hysterosalpingogram, the saline infusion sonogram, the genetic testing, the semen analysis, the ultrasounds. Every test came back normal. And at the end of it, a doctor I had met for less than 30 minutes told me my diagnosis was &#8220;unexplained infertility&#8221; and that the next step was IVF due to my age: 31.
That was it. There was no other path offered. No further investigation. No specialist to consult. No suggestion that maybe, just maybe, &#8220;unexplained&#8221; didn&#8217;t mean there was nothing wrong, but that no one had looked hard enough to find it.
When you are told IVF is your only path to motherhood, you do not weigh it as one option among many. You weigh it against childlessness. That is not informed consent. That is a cornered decision. Women across this country are walking into IVF cycles not because they have chosen it freely from a range of options, but because they have been handed an illusion that this is the only door left.
The grief of that is hard to describe. You inject yourself with hormones you do not fully understand, you mortgage your savings, you absorb the physical toll, and underneath it all is a quiet voice asking whether anyone has actually tried to understand your body. For many women, the answer is no.
<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" style="max-width: 605px; min-width: 325px;" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@healthillie/video/7629129637968268574" data-video-id="7629129637968268574">
<section><a title="@healthillie" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@healthillie?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@healthillie</a> Wild ride <a title="ivf" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/ivf?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#ivf</a> <a title="infertility" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/infertility?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#infertility</a> <a title="♬ original sound - Live Healthillie" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-7629129675540925215?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">♬ original sound &#8211; Live Healthillie</a></section>
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Restorative reproductive medicine fell into my lap. I did not find it because I was a smarter patient or a better advocate. I found it because I got lucky, and that should not be how women find answers about their own bodies.
Think about what is being asked of women in my position. We are expected, with no medical training, to somehow know that our doctors haven&#8217;t looked thoroughly enough. We are expected to advocate for tests we have never heard of, request referrals to specialists no one has mentioned, and second-guess the experts we are paying to guide us. How is a patient supposed to know what &#8220;extensive enough&#8221; looks like? That burden should not be ours to carry. But it is.
When I finally sat down with an RRM doctor, the consult lasted over an hour. He went through my history, my cycles, my labs, my surgeries, and patterns in my family. By the end of that conversation, he was recommending a diagnostic laparoscopy.
I was scared. I was also genuinely confused. I had no symptoms. No debilitating periods. No pelvic pain. No outward signs that something was wrong. Every standard screen I had been given had come back unremarkable, and now a doctor I had just met was telling me he believed there was something to find and that the only way to know for sure was surgery.
I said yes. And what they found inside of me was something very different than what I had been told. One of my fallopian tubes was, in fact, blocked — not open, as my IVF clinic&#8217;s hysterosalpingogram had indicated. I had stage 1 endometriosis, an inflammation of the uterine lining. I had a cyst blocking my cervix. And I had fibroids covering my uterus.
This was the body my IVF clinic was prepared to transfer embryos into.
I believe healthy embryos, the product of an extraordinarily expensive and physically grueling process, would have died inside of me, not because the technology failed, but because of medical neglect. No one looked closely enough to find what was actually wrong with me first.
Here is what I want every woman reading this to understand. The standard pathway in mainstream fertility care often looks like this: You get a basic workup, and if nothing obvious turns up, you are routed toward IVF. There is very little in between. And the women who do get a diagnosis — PMOS, endometriosis — are largely funneled toward the same destination. Sometimes a few rounds of intrauterine insemination are offered first, often because insurance requires it before covering IVF, not because IUI is the most appropriate next step. The diagnosis changes. The recommendation rarely does.
PMOS patients face significantly elevated risk during ovarian stimulation. A 2021 study <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/endocrinology/articles/10.3389/fendo.2020.615957/full">published</a> in &#8220;Frontiers in Endocrinology&#8221; followed nearly 2,700 women with PMOS undergoing IVF and found that roughly 25% developed ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (a complication that ranges from uncomfortable to genuinely dangerous, sometimes requiring hospitalization). The rate in the general IVF population is around 5%. Yet PMOS patients are rarely referred to specialists who treat the underlying drivers of their condition first, steps that could change what treatment they need at all, or make IVF safer if they do choose it.
Endometriosis is associated with lower IVF success rates, and the most effective treatment for the disease itself is excision surgery performed by a skilled endometriosis surgeon. Yet rather than being referred for treatment of the underlying disease, women are often told to suppress it hormonally in preparation for transfer. Suppression is not treatment. It manages the disease for the cycle; it does not address it.
These are not fringe conditions. They affect millions of women, and the standard pathway treats them as obstacles to bypass on the way to IVF, rather than as conditions deserving dedicated care.
I am telling my story because women deserve to know there are real, evidence-based diagnostic and treatment steps between an infertility diagnosis and an IVF cycle. We deserve more than 30-minute consultations for lifelong decisions. We deserve doctors who investigate before they intervene. We deserve to know that &#8220;unexplained&#8221; sometimes just means &#8220;not yet examined.&#8221;
Most of all, we deserve choice, not the illusion of it. We cannot explore our options if we are never given any.
I had to find that out the hard way. I am writing this so the next woman doesn&#8217;t have to.
***
<div>Iliriana Balaj is the founder of Live Healthillie, the author of &#8220;Yummy Colors,&#8221; and an integrative nutrition coach. She has dedicated her life to founding a low-tox marketplace sourcing the cleanest brands and advocating for people creating a healthier life for themselves by education and informed consent.</div>

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I Thought IVF Was My Only Path To Motherhood. Then Everything Changed.

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