Parenting: Who is it really for? (2017)
This is not parenting advice. He&#x27;s just talking about his life experiences and his point of view, a thing he seems to do a lot. And he&#x27;s rich and famous enough that people will read it.<p>I&#x27;m on my third parenting blog. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I&#x27;ve really struggled to get any traction with anything I&#x27;ve done.<p>I think I have really excellent credentials. I homeschooled. I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project for a time, which was pro bono professional work for a voluntary health and welfare organization dealing with the educational, emotional and social needs of gifted kids.<p>But that doesn&#x27;t really translate to a resume, so to speak. I get a lot of flak for trying to say &quot;I know something useful and I have special credentials.&quot; People mostly think I am making that up.<p>We look to famous actors and the like for stuff like parenting advice in part because we have some sense of knowing them and being able to trust what they say. Maybe someday I can address the &quot;parenting information&quot; space better than Sivers, but it takes more than just being a good parent to do that.<p>You also need to know how to write extremely well, navigate protecting family privacy while sharing inherently private stories and cultivate an audience. There may be more to it than that, but that&#x27;s a plenty tall order to begin with right there.<p>If people think it is awful that some rich guy who can afford to spend a lot of time with his kid is talking about that, then maybe go spend time on parenting blogs written by full-time moms or people with less vaunted financial circumstances.<p>Of course, one of the problems is that people working 9-5 who have children probably can&#x27;t manage to turn out a quality blog while doing all that. Good writing takes time and effort.<p>There is no perfect solution here. I was trying to develop a parenting blog when my kids were still minors and people on email lists were interested in what I had to say and I didn&#x27;t know how to deal with a lot of the pieces of that. I couldn&#x27;t monetize it effectively or get much in the way of traffic, etc.<p>So when I got divorced, no, my blogs didn&#x27;t support me. I got a corporate job instead and continued to fail as a blog writer. I got some success as a blogger while homeless.<p>This is partly me -- I didn&#x27;t know what I was doing -- and partly the world. The world didn&#x27;t really want to help me succeed.<p>If you want a certain kind of information to exist, then be a good audience. Go give attention, feedback and financial support to people doing that kind of writing. Help them develop their craft.<p>Sivers is so rich, he can afford to not really care what anyone thinks about him anymore. And he isn&#x27;t giving parenting advice per se here.