About Kidsomnia

Every parent we know has a version of the same evening. The kids are finally down. Someone mentions a new law, a test score, a program the neighbors signed up for. Forty minutes later you are reading a state education code on your phone, and you have learned nothing except that you should have started sooner.

We named that feeling. Kidsomnia is kid plus insomnia, and the insomnia is yours; the kid is asleep down the hall. The worry is a healthy instinct pointed at the wrong sources. Most of what reaches parents about school is a sales pitch, a culture war or a hunch with a headline on it.

We read the originals so the panic has less to work with

American education produces a remarkable amount of public evidence, and almost nobody reads it for fun. The National Center for Education Statistics publishes enrollment and achievement data. The Internal Revenue Service publishes the rules for education tax breaks. Congress publishes the laws. States publish what they actually do. Researchers publish studies that federal databases index in full.

Kidsomnia reads those documents and tells you what they mean for one kid in one house: yours. When the answer is a number, you get the number and where it came from. When the answer is “this does not matter,” we say that too, because permission to stop worrying is the most useful thing a magazine can offer at 11 p.m.

What you will find here

We cover news that changes something for families, long-running trends in American schools, practical guides, money moves, what the best-performing school systems abroad actually do, remote and online learning, learning outside school, and rankings whose full method we publish alongside the result.

Each piece is built around something you cannot get from a headline: a table we assembled, a calculation we ran, or a close reading of a primary document. We publish fewer pieces because of that, and we think you will forgive us.

What you will not find

We do not sell placement. We do not list or recommend private companies, schools or apps, and nobody pays to appear in a ranking. We do not cite other media as proof of anything. We do not publish medical or developmental advice; that conversation belongs with your pediatrician.

Who edits this

Kidsomnia is edited by Kate Smith, its founding editor. Kate decides what gets published and answers for every mistake. If you have found one, the corrections page explains how we fix them in public.

How we check things is written down in How we work and the editorial standards. To reach us, use the contact page.