Your Favorite Newsletters from 2024
Not sure I should be surprised, but I am…
I was in a conversation at work the other day when someone mentioned that I’d been writing Substack newsletters at a pretty fast clip.
“I’m not that fast,” I said, thinking of people who post multiple times a week, or have never skipped a week, or create different newsletters that go behind paywalls.
But then I began counting the number of newsletters I’ve put out. And this small but mighty Substck has sent out 38 newsletters this year, including this one here. Initially, I wasn’t sure how many people would be interested in caregiving and child care reporting, but I’m glad to see that 1) people care and 2) there are enough innovative child care policies out there to report on and 3) reading and writing about this work matters.
If we want to change our country’s perspective on the way we view caregiving, it starts by understanding just how important it is to our economy.
So what were the most read posts from
? The top four are below.Number 4…
But What About Child Care?
There are so many excellent Substacks out there on the post-election feelings that I’m not going to try and emulate them - but I’ll add that whatever referendum happened on Tuesday will be felt very deeply for the next four years.
This was my post-election rise-from-the-ashes post. We all need a way to process the next four years, and for sure my outlet is going to be writing and reporting on care. But the day after the election this year I sat down to write about how we can keep child care on the national agenda. Because - brace for it - both Republicans and Democrats care about child care and think it should be fixed. Polling shows this issue isn’t siloed for one political party. We may have some major disagreements on the delivery systems, but maybe this is a chance to agree that investing in kids and families has a good return on investment? At the very least, we have a few more years to keep child care in the national conversation and lift up the innovations at the state and local levels that are making a difference.
Number 3…
Can We Stop Hating on the PTA?
There’s a scene in the movie Bad Moms, where Christina Applegate’s character Gwendolyn, the PTA president, castigates Mila Kunis’ character Amy, who has brought in store-bought treats for a bake sale instead of baking something homemade. “I run this school and I can make life a living hell for you and your dirty little children, do you understand me?”
Being a PTA parent myself, I’d been wanting to write about this for some time. Being a school volunteer is not quite the mommy-wars and overdressed clique show that mainstream media has made it out to be, and the cliche of PTA parents is one that is long overdue for a shift. Besides, so many of the PTA volunteers are actually dads. And the work can be fun, and rewarding. Maybe it’s time our culture understood that just because something isn’t valued in the GDP it’s still worthwhile and a positive contribution to society.
Number 2…
The Unexamined Plight of Stay-at-Home Parents
Of all the misguided notions I had as a younger person, one of the top ones might have been the role of stay-at-home parents.
I love that this newsletter is on the list because it clearly has some live-wire qualities to it. We hold so many outdated notions about who is staying home with kids and why they make those choices, and too often many of our social policy supports (albeit, there are not many of them) entirely exclude primary caregivers who don’t have paid work.
and Elliot Haspel are doing some fascinating work and research in this area, and I’m excited to write more about it here in this space.And #1….drumroll please:
Congratulations, You’ve Won the Child Care Lottery
Teigue Linch remembers the email she got from Pine Forest, her daughters’ child care center in Burlington, Vermont. There was a new law in Vermont - Act 76 - that would help families pay…
This newsletter, about a family in Vermont who began saving over $2,000 a month on their child care costs because of Vermont’s Act 76, was my most widely read newsletter this year. The idea itself is brilliant - help people with their child care costs and then they will have more resources to devote to other parts of their lives. In this case, the family is no longer struggling financially and even started a 529 account for their twin daughters. It turns out that thoughtful public policy DOES make a difference in people’s lives - now we just have to get there in more places and hope that there will come a time soon when we can make such a change on the national stage.
Honorable mention goes to Pulling the Curtain Back, in which Warren and I detail the hour-by-hour existence of our lives, which ran on
and had the benefit of its wide reach so it likely was one of the top newsletters too.And Thank You!!
Thank you for reading and supporting this newsletter! This wouldn’t exist without an audience to read it - so thank you for helping us keep care and caregiving in the national conversation. Whatever wins happen for child care, I’ll be writing and reporting on them.