What's this all about?
ParentSounds is a newsletter dedicated to helping parents discover, support, and get inspired by other parents pursuing creative passions amidst the day-to-day rollercoaster that is family life.
There's a lot of great parenting content on the internet with tips for navigating the various highs and lows of having children. This is not another one of those newsletters.
No, ParentSounds is for the people reading the Instagram posts, watching the parenting videos, and consuming all of the other material that's already out there about how to be a good parent.
ParentSounds is about us: our personal ambitions, casual interests, and everything else that represents who we still hope to be as people while we try our best to raise our kids.
Every two weeks, we will profile somebody who is engaged in a creative or artistic pursuit (and who also happens to be a parent). We will talk to parents who make their living as artists, musicians, writers, and other kinds of creatives — as well as people with different kinds of professional lives who are doing what they can to keep unleashing their creative energy while balancing family and other commitments.
Our hope is that this newsletter can help different people in different kinds of ways. Where possible, we'll try to highlight parents who are creating things that you can enjoy - individually, or with your own family. We'll also make a point of always saying how you can support the person featured in the newsletter. Maybe it's by buying their book or music, maybe it's giving them a follow, maybe it's hiring them for a project, or maybe it's as simple as just sharing what they're doing with someone you know who would be interested. Our goal is to help creative parents to amplify themselves and their work.
But our biggest hope is that this newsletter can serve as a source of inspiration to all of its readers: to keep doing the things we love, even while we also live our double lives as imagined superheroes to the adorable bundles of life-changing responsibility also known as our children.
Here's to being a parent, and also to being a beautiful individual in your own right.
Join our community and come along for the ride!
Our Inspiration
Shortly after my daughter turned 1, I had a New Year's Resolution for 2022: I wanted to learn how to DJ. Electronic music had been a growing interest of mine for a long time, and I'd wanted to take DJ lessons for years before having kids. When I had the chance to borrow a DJ controller and get a few tips from some friends, I decided to start practicing in my (very limited!) spare time.
It turned out to be a pretty busy year for other reasons. In February, my partner and I found out that we would be welcoming our second child in October. So in between moving to and furnishing a new apartment, working our day jobs, shuttling our first kid to and from daycare every day, and getting ready for baby #2, I did my best to keep practicing and playing whenever I could. I knew that if I wanted to play for other people, staying out late at clubs was not going to be an option. So I started organizing family rave events during the day where people could enjoy house and techno music with their kids, and taking my turn playing there alongside some other more experienced DJs who helped me learn the craft.
Today I'm still learning all the different nuances of being a DJ, and my journey continues. But what really inspires me has nothing to do with DJing or with the music I like to play: it's the idea that parents should feel good about ourselves in order to do the best we can for our kids, and the feeling that there should be outlets for us all to keep being creative and sharing what we love to do with a broader community.
I hope you'll find the stories of parents in this newsletter to be some combination of fun, inspiring, joyful, and entertaining. I know I do.
Happy reading!
-Matt, Founder and Editor, ParentSounds
