Post-Mortem: A year of edits, support from EHRP, a baby, and a fellowship later...
my 18-month publishing journey!
Last year, I saw an Atlantic story that infuriated me: “We’re Missing a Key Driver of Teen Anxiety.” Takeaway? “A culture of obsessive student achievement and long schoolwork hours can make kids depressed.”
Unsaid: This is about the mental health of rich kids, and rich kids only.
Conversations about adolescent anguish tend to focus on one class extreme or the other. Usually, like this story, they zoom in on teenagers from wealthy, high-achieving families. This narrative blames grueling Advanced Placement classes, overscheduled afternoons of extracurriculars, and late nights of high-stakes homework, driven by unhinged parents.
Like most articles on the “miserable rich kids” beat, it extrapolates the challenges faced by the elite and applies them to everyone else. These stories resonate with the well-educated readers of prestigious publications, but the subjects they describe are in the minority.
My own experiences with social mobility put my spidey senses on high alert. What is the underlying factor making rich kids so stressed out — while poor kids are so stressed out, too?!
What if inequality, itself, is the problem?
So I hopped on it and pitched one of my favorite editors late on a Friday — and thus began this 18 month publishing saga.
I spoke to 20+ epidemiologists, demographers, pediatricians, econmonists, teachers, therapists, and youth — so much more than could fit in this 1800 word story. Did I know what I was doing? No. I just emailed everyone and got them to talk to me. I wrote it in 3 days.
I filed my draft. Then I got edits. Then I edited. And I waited, and I waited. One editor email went to spam — always check your spam! - and then, in the meantime, a war began. I got pregnant. I grew ½ of a baby before the piece was turned down almost a year after pitching.
I grew another ½ of a baby pitching all the other op-ed desks. Then I had a baby. Then she learned to poop without help and smiled and grabbed things and slept through the night. She rode an airplane! Still not published.
But meanwhile, I’d gotten the support of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. They are an amazing group that will pay you to write about inequality and poverty. Once they were supporting me, I had to place this story. Then I also applied to the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Reporting with this story.
Pro Tip: Apply for fellowships with stories you already wrote. That’s what everyone does.
I got the fellowship.
Enter: Slate! I wrote a couple of other pieces for them and everyone there is absolutely amazing. Rebecca did my estrangement story, I pitched her this, and she said yes.
In the meantime, the Lancet published a report that made this timely again — even if my initial rage from the Atlantic piece no longer applied.
Here is THIS baby!
OKAY BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT ATLANTIC STORY?!
One of my sources, that didn’t make it into the story, was Jean Twenge. She wrote her own SHOCKING rebuttal to this Atlantic story, crunching the data: “Academic Pressure Cannot Explain the Mental Illness Epidemic.”
Indeed, CDC data shows that the average 10th grader reports doing **one hour** of homework a day — a WAY more accurate figure to my experience in urban high schools. Meanwhile, the average student spends **nine hours a day** on entertainment media.
Twenge is pretty adamant that mental health concerns are from smartphones and social media use and do not track with economic trends, but I don’t believe unemployment is the best proxy for economic inequality: the working class never really recovered after the great recession, which happened to be when people got phones.
Or that just looking at the data after 2005 is enough. The teen suicide rate was much HIGHER in the mid 1980s to 1990s than it is today. And kids didn’t have smartphones then!
Did this description of inequality resonate with you? How have you seen it manifest? I’m going to be working on more stories and am eager for leads. Let me know in the comments below!
Thanks for sharing this, Emi. Way to persevere and get an important story out.
It’s incredible to me that your conclusion is not more widely accepted / discussed! Having come from an upper middle class background myself and mentored several low income teens through the college application process, I’ve never read anything that hits the nail on the head more regarding teen mental illness/anxious parenting
Another fascinating (to me) angle is geography: I grew up in the Midwest in a town where most people went to the local state university. My college roommate grew up in a boston suburb and where most of the adults had gone to a top-tier university. As stressful as my teenage years were, hers were infinitely worse: the only models of “successful” adulthood she had were crazy high-achievers who’d gone to Ivy League schools. At least I knew it was possible to go to a state university and still have a nice life.
Either way, the source of our teen anxiety/our parents’ helicopter parenting was clear: they were terrified of us falling out of the upper class. And the low income kids know that a selective school is their one shot at getting in