A TOTC Update

Why things look a little different around here

Note: Everything feels extremely heavy to me right now, and maybe it does to you too. I don’t have any words about what happened in Uvalde and it feels a little odd to share this update with you today, but I am, because this newsletter is important to me, even though it seems insignificant at times when heavy things are happening all around us. But thank you, as always, for reading.

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It’s been just over a year since I started writing this newsletter, and it simultaneously feels like wow I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for a year but also it feels like I have been writing this newsletter forever. I am very much a “start anyway” kind of person, so those of you who subscribed to the first iteration of this newsletter have watched me figuring a bunch of stuff out in real time, like what I want to be writing about and how I want to do it.

A year in, I have landed on a mix of interviews (written and audio) and essays, and I’ve just started adding discussion threads into the mix to give us all a chance to chat a bit more. I’m really excited about this balance right now — I absolutely love doing interviews and I’m thrilled to have some really great Q&As scheduled for this summer! — but I also love having the flexibility to shift or rearrange things as I continue to figure this out.

For now, you can click through to the different sections (Author Q&A, Think of the Children Podcast, Essays, Discussion Threads) from the newsletter’s home page, and you can also choose which ones you want to see in your in-box by going to your subscription settings in Substack. If a bunch of you end being like Nah we don’t want to listen to these audio episodes or you’re like Wow we love the essays so much!, I may shift the balance, who knows? But that leads me to my second bit of housekeeping:

A tip jar, not a paywall

This feels super vulnerable but here goes: I have added a paid subscription option to this newsletter. This is not a pay wall: all posts will continue to be available to all subscribers. But if you value this newsletter, I hope you’ll consider paying for it.

Call it a tip jar, an honor system, a pay-what-you-can or sliding scale model — whatever you call it, it feels like the right step for me right now. I love writing this newsletter, but it also takes up brain space and writing time that might otherwise go to paid work, and my bank account has definitely felt the pinch. I want to keep writing Think of the Children, and I also believe my writing has value. If you agree, I’d love for you to consider a paid subscription. But if that’s not right for you for any number of reasons, I totally get it!

If you do choose the paid model, please know that you are supporting me as a writer and as someone who cares passionately about parenting and education and the current injustice of doing both things in a country that has made it abundantly clear that it values neither.

Thanks for sticking around and for encouraging me to keep going! It means a lot. Next week’s newsletter will be the podcast version of my interview with Nate Hilger, which was a terrific conversation that I enjoyed so much, and I can’t wait to share the audio with you.