We’re Looking for Passionate Parenting and Education Writers and Researchers: What We Actually Want
The third generic submission landed in my inbox at 9:17 a.m. last Tuesday, right after I’d wiped strawberry jam off the scratched kitchen table and loaded the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. It opened with “Parenting is a journey that requires balance to raise well-adjusted kids” – I hit delete before I got to the second paragraph.
I started this blog three years ago, after my oldest daughter got her dyslexia diagnosis and I spent three months scrolling through content that didn’t match my real life. Every article was written in the same shiny, upbeat voice, telling me to stay positive and try this 10-step program that definitely worked for someone else. None of them mentioned the nights I cried after an hour of fighting through three sentences of a picture book, or the time I threw the expensive reading program in the trash and we watched Bambi instead. I was a third grade teacher for eight years before I had kids, so I knew enough to see the gap between what gets written for clicks and what people actually need.
Now that we’ve grown enough to add new contributors, I’m not looking for writers with years of bylines or perfect social media followings. I’m looking for passionate writers and researchers – and I’ll tell you what that actually means, because it’s not what you think.
Last spring, we got a submission from a first-year special education teacher in Cleveland. She’d found our blog after searching for “what they don’t teach you in sped training” and wrote a 1200-word piece about keeping granola bars and extra hair ties in her desk. She talked about how half her kids come to school without breakfast, and how a granola bar calms a meltdown faster than any de-escalation strategy she learned in college. She mentioned that she keeps extra hair ties because a lot of her middle school girls can’t focus when their hair is in their face, and their families can’t afford to buy a pack that doesn’t disappear after a week. That piece didn’t have a fancy keyword list. It didn’t have a clickbait headline. It got 120,000 views, and hundreds of comments from other teachers and parents saying “I do this too, I thought I was the only one doing something wrong.”
That’s passion to me. It’s not giving a talk about how much you care about kids. It’s noticing the small, messy, unglamorous parts of parenting and teaching that no one talks about because they don’t fit into a neat list of tips.
Two months ago, I got a pitch from a grad student studying early childhood development who’s also a mom of a toddler with speech delay. She’s doing a small research project on how different at-home activities affect language growth, and she told me she was surprised to find that most studies don’t account for how tired parents are. No one studies what happens when you don’t have 20 minutes a day to do the recommended flashcard activities, so she’s interviewing 20 working parents about what small 2-minute habits they actually fit into their days. That’s the kind of research we want. Not the stuff that just repeats what every other study has already said, but the stuff that asks the questions other researchers haven’t gotten around to asking.
A lot of people reach out to ask what qualifications we require. The answer is pretty simple: you need to be either living the thing you want to write about, or actively researching a question that matters to you for personal reasons. You don’t need a PhD, though if you have one and want to write about your work in plain language that a parent can understand over a napping kid, that’s great. You don’t need a teaching license, though if you’re a homeschool parent or a grandparent raising grandkids or a playground aide who notices things no one else does, that’s perfect.
I don’t want generic “10 tips for better bedtime” that you pulled from three other articles. I want your story about what actually works for your family, even if it’s messy and it doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re a researcher, I don’t want a long paper full of jargon. I want you to tell us what you found that surprised you, what that means for a parent who’s up at 2 a.m. worrying, what small change we can make tomorrow that might help.
To make this concrete, here are a few examples of the kind of work we’re actively looking for right now. We’d love a piece from a middle school teacher about how hall passes actually affect student anxiety, what small changes you’ve made that work. We’d love a piece from a researcher looking at how homework policies affect low-income families, what your data says most schools get wrong. We’d love a piece from a parent of a neurodivergent kid about how you handle birthday party invitations when your kid can’t handle big crowds, what phrases you use to explain that to other parents that don’t leave everyone feeling awkward. We’d love a piece from a cafeteria worker about what they wish parents knew about school lunch, the small things that make their job easier and the kids’ day better.
We can pay a $150 stipend for every piece we publish, which isn’t enough to quit your job, but it’s enough to cover a week of groceries or the supplies for your next research project. We don’t demand you stick to a strict deadline, we don’t force you to change your voice to fit some generic blog style, we don’t require you to promote the piece on your social media if you don’t want to.
Last night, I got a pitch from a dad who works as a custodian at an elementary school in Utah. His 12-year-old daughter has social anxiety, and he wrote about how he sees kids hiding in the bathroom stalls during recess, and what he does to check in on them without making them feel singled out. I wrote back first thing this morning asking him to send the full piece.
That’s the kind of work I want more of. I don’t know exactly what we’ll get from this call. I know there are hundreds of people out there with things to say that aren’t being said, people who don’t think of themselves as writers or researchers even though they’re the ones who know the most about what actually works for kids and families. That’s who we’re looking for.
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