Submission Guidelines for Smothering Us

If you have nothing nice to say about parenting, come sit by me…

Photo by Egor Komarov

May 27th, 2024

Hi, thanks for coming to read this. I’m glad you’re interested in contributing!

This publication is brand new, but I would love to have other parents contribute.

This is a publication for people who feel like our children are smothering us.

I can interpret that in at least two ways.

Smothering: They’re slowly killing us by depriving us of the joy and freedom of not having to be responsible all the time.

S(mothering): Parenting sucks, but at least we can learn something from it. Maybe sometimes our kids are mothering us by teaching us how to be better people and better parents.

For now, I’m going to keep the contribution guidelines as simple as possible.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

1. Make sure your story fits in with the theme of either “things I hate about parenting” or “being a parent sucks but I’m wiser and stronger, and this is why”.
2. Please do your best to edit this as well as possible before you hit the submit button — I am the only one working on this publication (for now) and it’s just one of many projects I have going. I don’t want to edit your bad grammar when you can use a Grammarly plugin for free.

If your story gets rejected, it’s most likely because it’s poorly edited

3. Please follow the publication on Medium before submitting — I won’t publish if you won’t follow and I think that’s fair.

4. Please share the work that you publish in Smothering Us on your own social media channels if you have them and use them.

5. Do the right thing and give credit where credit is due to images, quotes, and captions you use.

6. Absolutely NO use of AI-generated content is permitted in this publication. This includes AI-generated images!

If you can’t find an image with Medium’s built-in Unsplash option, don’t include a picture and I will find one that I think best fits your piece.

If I find that you’ve used AI to generate images or content posted in Smothering Us I will remove your story and also remove you as a writer.

HOW TO BE ADDED AS A WRITER AND SUBMIT:

I want to keep this super easy, so just leave a comment on this post with your Medium handle starting with @ so it’s easy for me to copy and paste.

I should publish your story within 24 hours — if that changes, the information on this page will, too.

Thank you so much for your interest in writing for Smothering Us — I’m not exactly glad that you feel the same way I do, but I’m glad you’re here and want to speak up with me so others know they aren’t alone.

Shit’s rough out there, guys.

We need to stick together and remember we’re all on the same team.

Are you a parent who struggles to find joy in raising their children?