How To Use Substack For Ongoing Learning As A Busy Parent Or Caregiver
It’s 9:18 on a Tuesday, and I’m kneeling on the linoleum by the fridge, prying a neon green Lego brick out from under the crisper drawer with a butter knife. My seven-year-old’s bedtime story ran 12 minutes long, the pasta bowls from dinner are still crusted with tomato sauce by the sink, and I have exactly 22 minutes before I need to turn my own lights out if I want to be functional for her 6:45 alarm tomorrow.
I left my full-time third grade classroom job three years ago, switching to part-time literacy tutoring so I could handle school dropoffs and the random sick days that come with parenting a kid with ADHD. I never wanted to give up on learning new things, though—both the skills that make me better at supporting the kids I work with, and the stuff that’s just for me, unconnected to lesson plans or behavior charts. For the first year, I cycled through every popular self-education hack: I downloaded three course apps, paid for two annual professional development subscriptions, and stacked three nonfiction books on my nightstand. Most nights, I ended up scrolling short-form video until my eyes burned, marking unread modules as “to do later” and never touching them. I signed up for Substack almost by accident, after a fellow tutor sent me a link to a small newsletter about dyslexia intervention, no new app download required.
I did everything wrong at first. I followed every big-name education writer people raved about online, added newsletters about parenting, climate science, cooking, and poetry, and ended up with 62 active subscriptions in two weeks. My personal inbox flooded with three to five new posts a day. I’d see the notification pop up while I waited in the school pickup line, open half a post while I watched for my daughter, then forget all about it when she climbed in chattering about recess. Every Sunday, I’d select all 40-something unread newsletters and mark them as read without opening one, feeling that same dull guilt I got when I threw out a half-eaten bag of spinach I’d bought with good intentions. I was treating Substack like an undergraduate syllabus I had to cram for, not a tool built to fit around a caregiver’s fragmented, unpredictable schedule.
The turning point came last January, when I sat in a plastic chair outside gymnastics, deleting old emails to free up phone storage. I unsubscribed from 50 newsletters that afternoon, and landed on a small set of low-effort rules I still stick to a year later.
First, I only keep 12 active subscriptions at a time, split evenly between three buckets I actually care about right now: evidence-based literacy instruction for tutoring, practical guidance for parenting neurodivergent kids, and beginner native plant gardening, my no-deadlines just-for-me hobby. If I want to add a new writer, I have to remove one I haven’t opened a full post from in the last month. It sounds restrictive, but it cut through the noise immediately. I used to think being a committed learner meant consuming as much broad information as possible, but that’s the trick social media sells to people already carrying too much cognitive load. Most of us don’t need 40 hot takes on national education policy that never touch our day-to-day work with kids. We need two or three consistent sources that answer the questions we’re already asking that week.
I also turned off instant email notifications for every subscription. All posts roll up into one single weekly digest that lands at 8 a.m. every Sunday, when I drink coffee on the couch while my daughter watches her weekend cartoon. Nothing pops up while I’m helping with math homework, mediating a Lego fight, or wrapping up a tutoring session. I never open Substack in the middle of a chaotic weekday anymore, because half-reading a post while half-listening to a kid doesn’t leave usable knowledge—it just adds more loose threads to the mental clutter I’m already carrying.
I don’t force myself to read every post cover to cover, either. I keep a 99-cent pocket notebook in my jacket, and when I read something that connects directly to something I’m dealing with that week, I jot one single line down. No cloud-synced highlights, no elaborate tagging system, no 10-page book notes. Last month, a literacy writer I follow explained that repeated reading drills don’t help kids with working memory gaps—the exact thing I’d been pushing one of my third grade students to do for weeks. I wrote “try echo reading instead of repeated reads for J” in the notebook, tried it that Wednesday, and cut his frustration in half. When the ADHD parenting newsletter ran a post about how single transition warnings don’t register for kids with executive function gaps, I scribbled the tip on a scrap of paper and taped it to the edge of my TV stand. I never save posts to a “read later” folder. I used to have one with 217 links, and I never opened a single one. If a post doesn’t make me want to jot one line down right then, I close it and move on. It doesn’t matter if it’s viral and everyone is discussing it. If it doesn’t fit what I’m working on right now, it’s not useful to me.
The best learning I’ve gotten has come from comment sections on small publications, the ones with 1,000 to 10,000 readers, written by people who do the same work I do. A few months ago, I left a one-sentence question on a speech pathologist’s post about persistent b/d reversals, asking for tricks that work past second grade. I got 12 replies from other tutors and classroom teachers, all with small, tested hacks I never learned in my college coursework. I ended up swapping printable resources with a tutor who lives 20 minutes from me, and now we meet for coffee once a month while our kids are in their activities. I don’t wade into arguments or hot takes; I ask one specific question when I have it, and answer other people’s when I’ve dealt with the same problem. It’s active learning, not passive scrolling, and I do it while I wait for pasta to boil.
I only pay for one premium Substack subscription a year, too. I used to sign up for free trials and forget to cancel, wasting $60 or $70 a year on writers I never read. Now I follow someone for free for three to four months first. If I’m consistently opening their posts and jotting down notes, I’ll pay for an annual subscription during their next drive. Right now, that’s the dyslexia intervention newsletter, and it pays for itself in one hour of tutoring work. Everything else I read is free, and that’s fine.
I think a lot of caregivers and former teachers carry this idea that self-education has to look like it did when we were in school: fixed weekly hours, a printed syllabus, a certificate at the end to prove you showed up. I used to beat myself up for dropping every six-week online course I tried, because one sick week or a busy stretch of meetings would throw me off and I’d never go back. Substack fits this weird, fragmented season of life because it doesn’t ask you to show up at a set time, or finish anything, or prove you learned anything. The catch is that you have to let go of that old student mindset to get anything out of it.
Last week, my daughter stayed home for three days with a fever, and I didn’t open Substack once. The only thing I read was a tattered picture book about a dragon who bakes cookies, three times in a row. When I opened my Sunday digest yesterday, I didn’t scroll through 12 backlogged posts trying to “catch up.” I read the two headlines that tied to the student I’m working with this week, jotted one line in my notebook, and deleted the rest. No guilt.
I don’t know if I’ll keep this same system a few years from now, when my daughter is older and I have bigger chunks of free time. I’ve thought about taking a botany class at the local community college once she’s in middle school, and maybe I’ll care more about state education policy than native milkweed varieties by then. Right now, though, it doesn’t feel like another chore on my already long to-do list. Last night, after I fished the Lego out and got her tucked in, I sat down with my cold chamomile tea, opened that week’s literacy newsletter, and spent 18 minutes reading a piece about oral language development. I jotted one line down, turned my phone off, and went to bed. I didn’t finish the whole issue. That was enough.
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