We are not a press release. We are a record.

Thank you for your interest in The Difficult Kids. Before you write, here’s how we work.

The Difficult Kids is a community archive of first-person stories from adults who survived emotional neglect, difficult families, and the silence that follows. Voices appear together as “The Voices,” an interactive wall on the homepage; each story is published only with the author’s explicit consent. We are a small, human-led project — not a wire service, and not a pool of sources for features.

Everything on this website — every story, every sentence, every image — is published for readers who come looking for something they recognize in themselves. That consent is for display here, not for reuse elsewhere without asking.

Please do not copy, republish, or redistribute pieces of this site without permission. A single sentence quoted with attribution is fine. For anything beyond that, or to write about The Difficult Kids as a project — why it exists, how it works, what it’s for — email us. Tell us who you are and where you’re publishing. We reply slowly; we read survivor submissions before press inquiries, and that priority will not change.

This room exists for survivors, not for clicks. We ask that you honor that distinction.

We do not connect journalists with contributors. We do not share contact information, pass along messages, or help arrange interviews. If someone who has shared their story here wants to speak with you, they will reach out on their own terms. Most will not. That is a choice we built this site to protect.

Please do not try to go around this boundary — scraping emails, direct-messaging people who have posted here, or using any other side channel to find contributors. What we do is based on trust. That trust extends to journalists as much as anyone else.

Thank you for understanding — and for caring about how stories like these are handled.

— The Difficult Kids