Six months after her first child was born, St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Aisha Sultan sneaked out of the house while her husband and daughter were sleeping and drove away—only to return a few minutes later. (She was in her nightgown, after all.) Afterward, Sultan realized she “didn’t see the voices of ordinary parents struggling with ordinary, daily dramas reflected in the news.”
So in 2008, she started a column, “Dirty Laundry.” She didn’t just want to offer predictable parenting advice or a firsthand, parenting-from-the-trenches-style column, though.
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“My motivation was to see and observe what parents were talking about or struggling with,” she says. In her column, Sultan explores topics like skyrocketing prom expenses, racism, and stay-at-home dads. (This fall, press syndicate Universal Uclick put Sultan’s column into syndication, under the title “Parents Talk Back.”)
Among the present-day issues that concern her, Sultan takes a particular interest in the effects of raising children in a technology-saturated age; in 2011, she earned a University of Michigan fellowship to study the topic in depth. Personally, she’s never allowed her own kids any screen time from Monday through Thursday.
“I want my kids to learn the importance of face-to-face conversation,” Sultan explains. “The importance of being outside. The importance of being bored.”
