Seeds of Change: A Family Conversation About Cannabis and Motherhood

September 10, 2026
By Daniel Crawford

This article first appeared in the Kids & Cannabis edition of Fat Nugs Magazine, published December 2025

I’m honored to be warming the seat for my buddy, Jim Berry, for this edition of our Homegrown series. Today, we’re not just talking gardening; we’re talking about succession – the critical matter of securing your future seed stock. When I look ahead, my vision focuses on the next generation, and the most irreplaceable ‘seed’ I have ever been given: my daughter.

Cannabis and Motherhood: A Family Conversation

Tender Baby Sprouts

You know that feeling when you are about to pop some new beans? Unlimited potential packed into those tiny little seeds. Dreams of what could be. It’s kind of like little humans. The next generation. A clean slate, free from previous mistakes. And just like your tender baby seedlings, little humans need guiding.

When we train our plants, we use gentle persuasion. By guiding, snipping, bending, and coaxing, we shape and form our girls to meet their environment, prepared and ready for their life as adults, ready to bring their fruits to maturity.

Children are a lot like those little seeds. Packed with potential. Eager to grow and experience the world around them. It takes unfettered love as a parent to let your kids blossom and become their best selves. And as much as we like to teach, it’s how we act that often makes the largest impact.

Stigmas Carry Heavy Weight

As much as the community is educating and raising global awareness of cannabis, stigma firmly remains. Money, propaganda, and time sure have had long-lasting effects.

The reasons the stigmas with cannabis are so difficult to break are that, over time, there has been a generational separation from the plant. You’ve seen what can happen when a flourishing system is broken. Take California prior to Prop. 64. Generational cannabis farms and entire communities were supported and sustained by cannabis, farmed by families.

Children helped their parents. Grandchildren helped their grandparents. Stoners from around the world would flock to make some money helping farmers bring their crops in and clean each harvest season. Cannabis was grown and consumed. It was normal, and it sustained community. It was just another crop on the farm.

For me and most of the people I knew, we had been separated from the plant by three or more generations. It’s hard to have positive conversations and relationships with cannabis because if you did talk about weed, it was because you were probably getting busted with it.

It takes courage to spark up near judgmental relatives who don’t have a problem gobbling up everything Rush Limbaugh said, but can’t understand the difference between their six dry martinis and your joint.

As much as we try to convince and persuade, most normalization (and indoctrination) happens at home. It takes talking about and educating the little ones in the room. We can no longer sneak off and hide in the basement or in the backyard. We have to consume with purpose.

This is exactly why I bring my daughter into the garden. When you understand cannabis is a plant, the hypocrisy of prohibition dissolves away. Plants are not good or bad. The moral assessment of “good” or “bad” requires the capacity to make conscious, rational, ethical choices. Plants lack these capacities. Humans are the ones who decide.

Puff, Puff, Passing the Torch Takes Important Conversations

Kids today are growing up in a society where cannabis is and always has been legal. Legalization didn’t just change the law; it transformed what responsible consumption is and how we must teach it. Teaching responsible consumption isn’t as simple as reading from a lesson book; it’s done by setting the example.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s in the Midwest, more likely than not, your parents weren’t being honest about their weed consumption. They couldn’t be. They were living in an era where their own children could be the snitches.

DARE, propaganda, and three-strike policies were enough to scare any weekend stoner straight. The most we’d get was the tried-and-true “Just Say No” campaign. I can’t believe that was the entire marketing pitch.

We were forced to figure it out on our own through trial and error and good old-fashioned experimentation. How nice would it have been to be able to have real conversations about cannabis when we were young with our parents? Not to consume with us, but to educate us. Unfortunately, our government did a great job trying to erase and eradicate the plant and her history.

My parents had a relationship with cannabis, but through the risk of losing their children (government) or their jobs (drug tests), they rarely spoke about it. It’s great to be able to educate my parents today, and even better, they enjoy learning about this beautiful plant.

So, for the Crawford family, cannabis has been normalized from early on. In fact, cannabis was part of life even before my daughter was born.

Planting Seeds

My wife had terrible hyperemesis during pregnancy. To balance her severe weight loss and constant nausea, cannabis was by far the safest medicine for her and our growing baby. At the time, we were living in Wisconsin, and her OBGYN wasn’t on board with cannabis use. So, we did a bit of research and found one who did.

We don’t hide our cannabis use from our daughter. We don’t sneak off and hide behind the shed to consume our medicine. We also don’t consume in the same space as her. She knows our medicine is not for children.

We are constantly having conversations and discussing what we are doing and why. Kids are naturally curious, and cannabis is naturally smelly. A perfect opportunity to talk terpenes and flavors, and flowers!

There are many ways to experience cannabis. Relate it to things kids understand, like the sensory experiences cooking brings with spices, extracts, and playing with flavors. For most of human history, medicine men and women, healers and religions have used natural elements, rich in terpenes, containing the building blocks for Western medicine as we know it.

A Cannabis Conversation with the Crawfords: Cannabis and Motherhood

I sat down with my family to talk about cannabis and give a little glimpse into our world. My wife, Melissa, has been by my side since I grew my first cannabis plant. She is a NICU nurse and knows a lot about health and wellness. My daughter, Ellie, has lived most of her life with me, working in the cannabis industry. To her, cannabis is just as normal as a beer after work or coffee in the morning.

Canna-Dad with Daniel Crawford_family photo

Daniel: Hi sweetheart, I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about Daddy’s work and the medicine Mommy and Daddy use. Is that ok?

Ellie: Ya!

Daniel: Do you know what Daddy does for work?

Ellie: You make cannabis medicine, and you make magazines about medicine.

Daniel: Isn’t it pretty cool that we are able to grow our own medicine?

Ellie: It is!

Daniel: Do you know why we say that cannabis is for adults?

Ellie: Because it is medicine?

Daniel: That’s right! And when a doctor recommends a medicine, only that person should take that medicine.

Ellie: That’s right!

Daniel: Why is having access to cannabis during and after pregnancy important?

Melissa: Cannabis can be helpful for many issues that pregnant and postpartum women may experience, such as nausea, vomiting, pain, and anxiety. For me, I literally wouldn’t have been able to eat without having access to cannabis.

I did try to stop consuming at one point (because of the incredibly uncomfortable stigma), and it made me much sicker. My OB actually recommends that I go back to using cannabis, because the benefits far outweighed the risks.

Daniel: What were the risks if you were not able to consume cannabis?

Melissa: I was sick with hyperemesis from the time I was six weeks pregnant. I actually lost 30 lbs from the malnutrition and dehydration. For the last five months of pregnancy, I went to the hospital every Tuesday and Thursday for two liters of IV fluids each visit.

When I stopped using cannabis while I was pregnant, I stopped eating. I would have needed a feeding tube for the remainder of my pregnancy and would likely have been hospitalized. Thankfully, I decided two weeks without cannabis was enough, and I went back to my normal routine.

Daniel: Can you consume cannabis and continue to breastfeed safely postpartum?

Melissa: Yes, you can consume cannabis and safely breastfeed! Obviously, don’t get high to the point that you cannot safely care for your child and give them everything they need. When you’re breastfeeding, it’s important to know exactly what you are consuming and be aware of what could be passed along to your baby.

We grew our medicine ourselves, and I had been a part of lovingly tending to the plants every step of the way, from seed to harvest. I knew it was free of any containment. Because THC is fat-soluble, it is possible breast milk could contain a very small amount of THC for a week or so after consumption. But, there has not been anything proving this will have any negative impact on nursing babies of cannabis-consuming mamas.

Daniel: How does cannabis help you as a mother?

Melissa: As a mom, cannabis can be helpful for everything! Really. From giving me motivation to get things done, to helping calm my nerves and unwind at the end of the day. I am not a “wine mom.” I am a proud CannaMom!

Daniel: How do you normalize cannabis use while also teaching about safe consumption?

Melissa: We always refer to cannabis as medicine with our daughter. We don’t hide smoking, but don’t ever smoke in the same space that she is in. Aside from any potential effects of the secondhand smoke, the smoke itself isn’t pleasant to be around! We have taught her about the benefits of the plant, but also that any medication can be dangerous if it’s not meant for you to take.

We are incredibly safe with storage of any edibles around the house, but as a precaution, I have also explained that some adult medications come in packages that might look just like a treat. We don’t talk about strictly recreational use of cannabis at all; we don’t make it seem like anything that looks “fun” or whatever. We talk about how it can be helpful if it’s used by the right person for the right things.

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