Why We’re Looking For Passionate Parent Writers And Education Researchers For Our Blog
Last Tuesday, I sat at my kitchen table at 9:17 a.m., coffee gone cold, half a peanut butter toast congealing on a chipped ceramic plate, scrolling through the comment section of this blog. Under my laptop was a crumpled permission slip for my son’s 7th grade camping trip, and a peeling sticker that says “Cool Minds Read Different” I’d pulled off a new pack of pencils. I’d just posted a piece I wrote about fighting our school district to get proper reading interventions for dyslexia, and the comments were piling up faster than I could read them. Most were from people saying “me too,” that they’d been through the same fight. But one stopped me: “This is great, but does anyone know what this looks like for a single mom working two jobs who can’t take three days off to go to IEP meetings?” I stared at that comment for five minutes. I couldn’t answer that. I’m married, I quit my 4th grade teaching job to stay home with my son when he was little, I have the flexible schedule that lets me take half a week off to meet with administrators if I need to. My perspective is real, but it’s not the only one. That’s when I decided it was time to look for more people to write here.
A week later I met a friend of a friend at a downtown coffee shop, a grad student who’s doing research on unstructured recess and its impact on third graders’ social skills. She told me she’d spent the last two years collecting data from 12 local elementary schools, and her results are pretty clear: adding 10 minutes of unstructured play every day reduces classroom disruptions by almost 30%. But most schools are cutting recess to add more test prep. She’s writing her thesis on it, it’ll get published in an academic journal, maybe a hundred people will read it. “I just want parents to know they can push back on this,” she said, stirring her oat latte. “It’s not just that kids like playing. It’s good for their learning. But no one’s asking me to write that for regular people.”
Over the last three years of running this blog, I’ve noticed a pretty consistent gap. Most parenting and education content falls into one of two buckets. Either it’s written by people who don’t have day-to-day experience with the issue they’re writing about, full of generic tips that don’t actually work when you’re tired and broke and just need to get through the week. Or it’s high-level research that’s locked behind paywalls, written in jargon that makes my eyes glaze over even with my teaching background. What’s missing is the stuff in between: people who are passionate about a topic because they live it every day, or they’ve studied it up close, and they can explain it in plain language with concrete things you can actually try.
We’re not looking for professional writers with thousands of social media followers. We’re not looking for perfectly polished posts that fit a viral keyword template. We’re looking for people who have something specific to say: that could be a Black parent who’s spent three years navigating the special education system, and knows what stereotypes you have to push back against that no one talks about. It could be a first-year special ed teacher who’s figured out a low-cost system for organizing IEP paperwork that doesn’t require you to spend 10 hours a weekend on it. It could be a researcher studying bilingual education who can explain to parents why speaking your native language at home doesn’t slow down your kid’s English learning, in plain terms that don’t require a degree to understand. It could be a grandma raising her grandkid with ADHD who has tips for accessing free resources that most people don’t know exist. It could even be a student who’s grown up with dyslexia or autism and wants to tell parents and teachers what actually helped them when they were in school.
We offer a $150 stipend per post—we know that’s not a lot, but it’s something to cover your time, whether that’s a month of gas for your car or a new set of books for your classroom. We don’t make you change your voice to fit some brand guide. If you want to swear, if you want to say that you still don’t have it all figured out, that’s fine. All we ask is that you write what you actually know, that you include specific steps people can take, and that you don’t sugar coat the hard parts. For example, if you’re writing about how to calm down an anxious kid before a test, don’t just say “practice deep breathing.” Tell us what three breathing exercises actually work for kids who won’t sit still, what you keep in your kid’s backpack that helps, and what you do when nothing works.
The thing is, learning and parenting don’t look the same for everyone. The problem that keeps you up at 2 a.m. might be nothing like the problem that kept me up at 2 a.m. when my son was little. But right now, most of the content available only reflects a narrow slice of experience. That leaves a lot of people feeling alone, like they’re doing something wrong, because no one is writing about their specific situation.
I still scroll through comments most mornings, over cold coffee, and see questions I can’t answer. I got one yesterday from a dad asking how to talk to his middle schooler about their dyslexia after they came home crying from being teased about reading slowly in class. I gave him the best advice I had, but I know there’s a parent out there who’s been through that exact thing, who can tell him what they said that worked, and what they said that didn’t. I don’t know how many people will reach out, or what kind of stories we’ll get. But I know that every real story shared here will reach someone who needs it, someone who’s sitting where I was six years ago, searching for any bit of real, honest information that makes them feel less alone. That’s all we’re trying to do.
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