We’ve all heard it before: “I’ll have kids once I get my life together” or “when I’m ready to settle down.”
And, there’s no shortage of research that suggests psychedelic properties — particularly magic mushrooms — have the power to help parents create stronger bonds, have a greater sense of empathy, and overcome or manage psychological issues:
- “A single dose of psilocybin enhances creative thinking and empathy up to seven days after use” (Sub-Acute Effects of Psilocybin on Empathy, Creative Thinking, and Subjective Well-Being)
- “Psilocybin significantly increased explicit and implicit emotional empathy, compared with placebo, whereas it did not affect cognitive empathy nor moral decision-making.” (Effect of Psilocybin on Empathy and Moral Decision-Making)
- “Findings suggest that psilocybin with therapy is efficacious in treating MDD, thus extending the results of previous studies of this intervention in patients with cancer and depression and of a nonrandomized study in patients with treatment-resistant depression.” (Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder)
So if taken responsibly, like microdosing, it should theoretically help parents manage difficult emotions and conditions as well as help them build stronger bonds with their children. Luckily for us, there are parents who are currently practicing and can attest to psilocybin’s benefits.
Pro-Psilocybin Parenting
“Let me assure you, I am not actually tripping on these mushrooms,” writer Christina Rivera Cogswell notes in this HuffPost article. “And though the noticeable immediate effect is for me less than a cup of caffeinated coffee (which I do not drink because it makes me shaky and sleepless), I reserve my nibbles [of magic mushrooms] for the slow days after the kids have left for school when I have hours to drop into my writing (which I feel the psilocybin serves).”
In an interview with Insider, three microdosing moms share how psilocybin mushrooms have helped them and their parenting.
“I had a lot of rage where I wanted to hurt my baby. Sometimes she wouldn’t stop crying, and I just had so much anger inside of me that I was afraid for her, which caused me to want to kill myself because I was afraid that I was going to hurt my kid,” one mom, Natalie, reported. In her interview, she revealed that her microdosing regimen made her world feel more orderly and in-flow. Now, “she’s able to watch her daughter all day, study for school, and work, while feeling a sense of calm she never had before.”
Another mom, going by Mama de la Myco, shared how her microdosing regimen helped her process childhood and generational traumas she wanted to avoid passing along to her son. “My father was a drug addict, so me taking this medicine, seeing my parents as real people, and knowing they raised me from a traumatized space gives me a lot of compassion for how I was raised,” she said. “It also allows me to drop those things they gave me, because I understand I don’t have to continue that line.”
The third mom, Nahea Metoyer, began microdosing to relieve postpartum symptoms that made her irrationally anxious with her first child. Her regimen helped ease those anxieties and created a better headspace for her to tend to her second child, who is on the autism spectrum. It’s also helped her with her parenting even through big life changes like job loss and her husband working from home. Metoyer’s husband also began microdosing and she noticed that his parenting anxieties decreased as well.
If you’re a parent who also follows a microdosing regimen, we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to share your story in the comments.
