Burning questions

Or, crowdsourcing my way out of writer's block

Some of you may know that I have been trying to write a book¹ about the intersection of parenting and education (yes, the very topic of this newsletter! Not a coincidence) for a while now. All of this started out because I had burning questions I couldn’t find the answers to. Despite consuming A LOT of content about kids and school and being a mom, I still found that I didn’t understand why things were the way they were.

The first time this struck me was when my daughter was still very small. I was an editor at my local newspaper, and often (at least once a week, sometimes more) worked night shifts, getting home around 12:30 or 1 a.m. When my daughter was still a baby, I would often come home to hear her cries leaking out through the open upstairs windows, and silently accept her fussy body from my husband, who had already been up with her for hours.

I would walk and bounce with her in my arms, walking tiny figure eights on the fluffy rug of her nursery, trying to get her to settle down enough to get to sleep.² This would go on sometimes for hours. It was then that I most often thought, How the hell has the human race survived if this is what it takes to get babies to sleep?!

Of course, what I was doing was not magic, and was not necessary to get my baby to sleep. But that curiousity remained. How did people in olden times cope with what seemed to be to be an intolerable reality? I felt sure, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that generations of caregivers had not spent hours bouncing their babies in an attempt to get them back down to sleep. So I did what anyone would do; I started Googling, and I wrote about what I found.

“We tend to think of a long, uninterrupted night’s sleep as a biological norm — something our body craves and needs,” I wrote in 2013 when my daughter was just 18 months old and I was clearly going out of my mind with sleep deprivation. “But in 2001, a Virginia Tech historian published a paper (and a subsequent book) revealing that, for centuries and as recently as the 1800s, it was not uncommon for people to sleep for a few hours, wake for an hour or so, then return to sleep.”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right; that the way I was parenting did not make any sense. Then, my daughter started school, and I started a new job that was part of the public education system, and I suddenly had a lot more questions.

I spent most of my days in an office down the hall from the prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms, which was wonderful in many ways, but baffling in others. I watched 4- and 5-year-old kids, brand-new to school, being shushed in the halls and directed to walk in a straight line, without touching the walls, without making a sound. When kids got fidgety or hands-y or loud, I heard the teachers say things like, “that’s five minutes,” meaning the fidgety, hands-y, loud kid would get five fewer minutes of recess. I thought about how little time my daughter, and the kids in the schools where I worked, got to eat their lunches. I learned what an IEP was and I learned how hard it can be to navigate the byzantine bureacracy of the public school system — not just the paperwork and the phone trees, but also the endless number of apps and third-party platforms and logins and passwords and things to keep track of.

sara petersen @slouisepetersen

I absolutely can NOT handle the multiple platforms with hellishly unintuitive, un-user-friendly interfaces required of parents with elementary school kids. Sports apps, more sports apps, school apps, school lunch apps, piano lesson apps, TOO MANY APPS.

My new job gave me more time to read, and I devoured things like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s mind-blowing “Mother Nature,” and Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti’s thoughtful, thorough “Love, Money, and Parenting.” Most of the people I’ve interviewed for this newsletter have been people whose books I’ve read, or wanted to read, because in some way, those books answered parts of my questions, which are, in no particular order:

Why is parenting so hard right now?

Was it always this hard?

Why am I raising my kid so differently from the way my parents raised me?

Why is school the way it is?

What even is the point of school?³

But I am still thinking about all these things, all the time. And this is where I’d love to have your help. If you’re reading this newsletter, you, I think, might wonder about some of these same things. I’d love to know:

What questions do you have that aren’t being answered by the books that are already out there about the culture of teaching and of raising kids?

What is missing from the current conversation around parenting and school?

What have I written about these topics that really interested you?

I plan to jump back into the querying trenches this fall with a revised book proposal, so I really appreciate your input and insight as I try to wrestle with my 10,000 notecards of research⁴ and figure out what it is that I have to say about, you know, parenting, education, and why it's all so f*$king hard. Thanks for your help, and for hanging in here with me as I try to figure this out!

1. Or, more accurately, trying to get someone to agree to pay me to write a book, based on my proposal.

2. If I had this to do over again, I would do less bouncing, because my knees are absolutely SHOT from all the deep knee bends I used to do, based on some insane, 2 a.m. belief that it would magically soothe her to sleep.

3. I read the NYT series that explores this question, and I dream of an alternate universe in which I could have written one of those essays. Maybe in the next life.

4. Only barely an exaggeration.