Post-Mortem: A year of edits, support from EHRP, a baby, and a fellowship later...
my 18-month publishing journey (hint): I was way too into one idea about this story
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, unfortunately, the editor’s edits went to spam. (When I discovered this, I truly, truly hated myself.) In the meantime waiting, 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. I thought “this must be an op-ed.” I couldn’t break out of my own head about what the story was.
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.
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.
And she made it 1,000,000x better, like the great editor she is. The kind of changes that make you think:
Wow, if only I’d had these edits before - it wouldn’t have taken me 18 months!
Why didn’t I pitch Slate a year ago?? Why was I so convinced that this was an op-ed that I didn’t look outside those confines?
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.
Love your article. I think it also speak to children of immigrants and kids with older siblings that do extremely well in school, career, life, whatever. Having gone to a public high school with a good sample size of rich and poor kids (and you are in the middle somewhere), it does give me some insights in what you talked about in your article. I think a lot of the stress and mental health issues comes from a lot of places, doesn't matter whether you are rich, poor, middle class, whatever kind of parents you have and whatever siblings you have. They and your surroundings will impact you some way, and it's not easy to teach the kid who's still maturing both physically and intellectually to navigate this so they will grow up healthy both mentally and physically. In a way, I don't know what I did or my friends and relatives did so I came out OK. Maybe life's different back in the 80s when I was growing up - a lot simpler time than today's with all our distractions and social medias and whatever. Another thing that the article reminded me is what one of my high school friend said the 1st year when I was in college and he's graduating - he somehow reconcile with his immigrant and successful parents - They are doing the best that they can to bring him up, and often time, they don't know what they are doing, for better or for worse. Maybe that's his way to tell himself everything is OK.