This is my hundredth letter, and I want to say something.

I started Parenting Pitch because there was so much parenting content about little kids. The babies, the toddlers, the sleep training, but almost nothing about the middle years, which honestly feel like really important ones. Elementary and middle school is when they start becoming real people, with friendships and opinions and problems you can't kiss better. It started with youth sports topics, but it turned into so much more.

Sports are a great training ground, a small field where kids pick up bigger life lessons about losing, showing up, and being part of something. From there it just kept growing into everything else about this stretch of parenting.

That was a hundred issues ago. Somewhere around 17,839 words, which I'm told is roughly two novels.

I do want to say a few true things, though, and ask you for something.

I'll be honest, growing this thing has been humbling. A hundred Thursdays in, and I still sit down every week knowing I have to earn your attention all over again. But the people who read it actually read it, and that means more to me than any number. If you've stuck around, it's because you want to be here, and I don't take that lightly.

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I didn't expect writing about parenting to change my own parenting. I assumed I'd be reporting on it. Instead I'm just aware of more.

I've always been a fairly calm person. That part isn't new. But now, when something's going on in our house, good or bad, I'm analyzing it slightly more as it happens. I'm thinking about something I read, or a piece of research that came out, or an argument I had with myself in a draft three weeks ago. I'm considering how it might apply to us.

That's not always comfortable. There's a version of this where you're so busy observing your own family that you stop being in it.

But mostly it's been good and there's a second thing I didn't see coming: when friends come to me with something, I can speak to it more clearly than I used to. Not because I know more. Because I've already had the argument with myself, in writing, and I know where I landed.

That's the part that surprised me most. I thought I was writing this for you.

I write about my children. I've chosen to do it, and I've thought about it more than it probably looks. But, I have a rule for it: 

If my child, as an adult, looked back and was embarrassed that I wrote this, it doesn't go in.

Not embarrassed as a teenager, they are embarrassed by everything, including the way I park. Embarrassed at thirty, reading it properly, with their own life around them.

That rules out a surprising amount. There have been topics I've shelved completely and a few where I've not shared all the specifics.

The medium matters too, and that was deliberate. I'm not putting videos of my kids online. I'm not turning them into content.

I'm using my experience of raising them as a way to work things out, and passing the working-out on. We're all going through this at the same time, and I happen to be writing it down.

The issues that land are the ones about something happening right now in my house, or in the houses of the parents I see around me, or on Reddit, or in an email from one of you asking what I'd do.

But, I don't think it's the advice that does it. It's that I don't take a side. I've changed my own position several times as my kids have gotten older, and I'll almost certainly change it again.

If this newsletter has a job, that's probably it. Not telling you what to do, just letting you ease off, knowing that whatever you're in the middle of, most of us are in it too.

I know what's happening in my house, and I write from that. Some weeks it clearly lands and some weeks I can tell it didn't.

So tell me. Everything below is something I feel would relate to you and most of them I already have material on, I just haven't known whether anyone wanted it.

Something else? Hit reply and tell me in one line. Those are usually the best ones.

I'll say this quickly.

Years ago I read Esther Wojcicki's book about raising successful people. She's the mother of three remarkably accomplished daughters, and she wrote it from the position of here's what I did.

So there's a version of this where my kids turn out brilliantly and somebody goes back through a hundred issues to work out how. I have no way of knowing whether that happens. It could go entirely the other way, and this becomes a hundred-issue record of precisely what not to do.

Either way it'll be useful to somebody.

One last thing.

A few weeks ago I got an email from someone I've never met. Normally when I hear from a reader it's someone I know - a friend, a parent from school, somebody being kind. This was a complete stranger, who said she reads every issue and that one in particular had landed for her.

I wrote back. Partly to say thank you, and partly because it was genuinely nice to find out somebody's feeling supported. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't, when you've written a hundred of them mostly sharing your own struggles and hoping for other parents to relate. 

A hundred issues. Two years of Thursdays, and I'm proud of that. Thank you for reading, for replying, for being the kind of parents who don't need to be perfect at this.

Here's to the next hundred!

Lakshmi 💛

P.S. If you only do one thing today, do the second poll. It decides what lands in your inbox for the next few months, and it takes less time than deleting this email.