Meet Ashley Gardner of Growing With The Gardners in Cobb County

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashley Gardner.

Ashley, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I’ve always been a firm believer that you should live your life as loud as you can. That you should share your good times, your rough times and fumbles in life with other people because God gives us these learning experiences to help the next person that may need a nudge in the direction you’ve already walked. And that’s exactly what I execute through my family’s alias Growing With The Gardners. I kicked off this alias at the top of 2018 because there weren’t many positive black families out in social media land. I’m not going to lie, I loved scrolling through these mommy blogger’s pages seeing perfectly curated feeds with stay at home moms (SAHM) snapping photos of their latest high-end fashions or other moms decorating their family home as if HGTV would be over any minute to shoot an episode. And these mommies were the cutest but I realized that none of these perfectly curated feeds looked like me. And that is damaging. My continued focus is to be a positive example for families that look like me because media isn’t showing the world this part. While most of my community come from underprivileged circumstances, like myself, we still rise to have beautiful marriages, to be supermoms, business owners, home buyers, debt free and much more even in the mist of being served sour lemons. So for me, it’s about sharing my life experiences on Instagram and YouTube to advocate for positive black families.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Not at all. Anytime you share a piece of yourself on social media, it allows an opportunity for people to provide unsolicited feedback. There was a time I received so many negative comments when I shared my husband and I went through something as common as the circumcision process with our newborn. Someone even went so far to say that I’m a horrible mother for abusing my son in this way. This is when I realized that if you put it out there for the world to see, people will share their feedback and not all of it will be positive, but it was up to me to not allow the negative energy to take root in me. And not to take comments too personally.

Growing With The Gardners – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
By day, I work at Google, by night I’m a content creator. On my platform, I create content from life experiences my family is journeying through at the time, our real-life experiences, and times when I partner with brands to produce targeted content my audience may be interested in. For example, we’re trying new methods to successfully sleep train our almost six month old, and so this would be something I share with our broader social media community. Most of my content is experienced through video logs or photos on Instagram and YouTube.

I chose the name Growing With The Gardners because we’re an imperfect family that continuously strives to grow — and if you choose to journey with us, you’ll see continued progress, lessons learned and us always being intentional about getting to the next level spiritually, mentally and physically, as a family.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success for me isn’t based on how much money we make, but how helpful or impactful sharing my family’s most vulnerable experiences is to other families in life. Hearing how they’ve learned from something I’ve posted or how they succeeded at something because one of my posts inspired them. That means so much more to me and is what affirms me that I’m doing what I was meant to do.

Contact Info:

• Email: growingwiththegardners@gmail.com
• Instagram: @growingwiththegardners

Image Credit:
MaddyEm Photography (newborn photos and family photos)
She Lives Deliberately (desk photo)

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