Writing Articles

They used to send children up chimneys and down coal mines. Best place for them, some might say. Sadly, our nanny state has outlawed these time-honored methods of gaining an income. But nowadays you can set your kids to work in a painless way – so painless in fact that they won’t even know they’re working.

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They cost you a fortune in designer gear, school trips and chocolate bars. Granted they're entertaining, but if you play your cards right they can also be a bottomless well of revenue. Just watch, listen and write.

Parenting magazines and women’s magazines are overflowing with markets for articles on the parent-child relationship. And some of the popular women’s magazines have a column for readers’ child anecdotes. Just one word of caution: if the child isn’t your own, you’ll need to get the parent’s or guardian’s permission to send in a photo.

But you don’t have to limit yourself to these columns. Many women’s letters pages feature a high proportion of letters on family matters, particularly the parent/grandparent/child relationship.

If you have an idea that warrants more coverage than a “filler” article, there’s a wide range of parenting magazines that accept freelance contributions, particularly in America.
Don't forget your market research. For example, there’s no point in writing about pregnancy or breast-feeding if you’re targeting a publication aimed at parents of teenagers.

But what if you don’t have children? You’re perfectly entitled to prefer cats and dogs. That doesn’t preclude you from writing for parenting magazines. Teachers and others who work with children probably know more than most about parenting, whether or not they have children of their own.

You may have nephews and nieces you can observe – always from a safe distance, of course. Or your neighbours may have offspring you can borrow for purely commercial purposes.

Any story that stimulates debate is popular with editors. Try sparking a discussion on the relative intelligence of boys and girls. Or better still, how about an article that compares the intelligence of children and dogs?

Then there’s parenting from a child’s point of view. Try asking yourself how your children see you. You must have been a child yourself at some time or another. Indeed some of us have never entirely left the childish state behind. So go on, unleash your inner child. Mine is rampaging through the park even as we speak.

CHILD: http://www.child.com/child/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/child/story/data/1131397007284.xml&categoryid=/templatedata/child/category/data/1131398392703.xml&page=2 is a publication that addresses a wide range of children’s issues. They include children’s health, education and fashion, as well as parenting and marital relationships, child behaviour and personal essays on family life.

THE IMPERFECT PARENT: http://www.imperfectparent.com/submit/index.php accepts the fact that parents are people too. Perhaps your parents were not exactly the ones you would have chosen. So tell The Imperfect Parent where they went wrong.

And if you’re a parent yourself, this publication will allow you to forgive yourself or at least make a few excuses as to why your offspring sometimes regard you as less than godlike.

When I last visited this site, the publication had a backlog of submissions, but proposals were still being invited.

MOTHERING: http://www.mothering.com/sections/submission_guidelines/submission_guidelines.html aims to empower readers to make changes in their lives and enable them to be their own experts. Topics range from pregnancy and breast feeding to child education and children’s activities. Health and family living are also featured and each issue contains several poems. The magazine also accepts photographs, either on their own or to illustrate an article.

GRAND MAGAZINE: http://www.grandmagonline.com/ws.asp celebrates that happy state where you can hand children back to their parents to be cleaned up after you’ve done all the fun stuff with them.

Try writing to this magazine about how grand it is when you can do really silly things and the youngsters love you for it even if their parents disown you.

PARTNERS AND PARENTS: http://www.suite101.com/freelance_writers/ is an online publication that serves as a comprehensive advice centre for family relationships, covering dating and marital guidance, activities for children, grandparents’ issues and advice on how to age gracefully, and how to cope with being a single and/or working parent.

This could be a good publication to which you submit that feature about overcoming the difficulties posed by step-families – the “yours, mine and ours” syndrome. And if you follow the “write for us” link, you’ll find links to an assortment of additional publications sheltering under the Suite 101 umbrella.

BRAIN, CHILD: http://www.brainchildmag.com/guidelines.html acknowledges you don’t have to be brain-dead to be a parent. That’s just a side effect of parenting. For the day when that brainwave comes crashing onto the shore, the “magazine for thinking mothers” might fit the bill.

Brain, Child welcomes personal essays and news items. It’s open to humour and unusually for a parenting magazine, it even uses fiction.

ADOPTIVE FAMILIES: http://www.adoptivefamilies.com/articles.php?aid=259 is a “before, during and after” resource for the chosen ones and their adoptive families.

You mean people actually choose a child over a puppy or a kitten? Well, there’s no accounting for taste!

A typical issue contains articles on how families went about adopting, as well as articles from the viewpoint of adults who were adopted as children. Topics covered also include issues concerning the adopted child’s birth parents.

PARENTING TEENS: http://www.parentingteens.com/guidelines.shtmldeals with young people who have reached that critical stage in their development which occurs just before they become human. This publication invites contributions from parents, educators and from teenagers themselves. It doesn’t claim to offer professional advice, but much of its content is pretty heavy stuff, addressing such topics as drug and alcohol abuse.

Perhaps, on reflection, it’s not such a bad thing you can’t send them up chimneys or down mines. Just think of all that dirt they’d be traipsing indoors!

Love and nurture your children by all means. Spoil them rotten if you must. But sooner or later there has to be a payback time.

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