SW FL Parent & Child celebrates 20-year anniversary

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People often ask us our origin story. Here it is.

Twenty years ago, I was a newlywed 27-year-old reporter joining The News-Press in Fort Myers as an environmental writer. My husband and I found a house to rent in Cape Coral despite people warning us it was for the “newlywed and nearly dead.” I’m glad we didn’t listen. Cape Coral has been a great place to raise our two children.We didn’t have to worry about which elementary school our kids got accepted to — they all had great reputations. And the city grew so much that after a few years we realized we weren’t going “over the bridge” to Fort Myers to shop or go to dinner.

Little did I know that first year here, on the other side of that bridge, a mom of two young children was producing this parenting magazine out of her house. The first issue — dated December 1999/January 2000 — landed just before our move here in February 2000.

Of course, the idea for Southwest Florida Parent & Child germinated long before the first issue.

“We belonged to the YMCA, and we were relatively new to this area,” says the magazine’s founder, Connie Ramos-Williams. Her kids were 8 and 6. “I was running into a lot of families on the sidelines of games … and a lot of parents that were going through the same things we were going through.”

What’s there to do for families in Southwest Florida? Which doctors should we go to? How do you register for school?

“I thought, why should I rely on somebody else to do this? Let me take this resource and create this,” she says.

It took about six months to launch.

Connie’s daughter, Natalie, graces the first cover. Inside, stories explore ways to include your kids on New Year’s Eve celebrations, what you can do about speech problems, safety in schools, dining deals and events.

Connie’s son, Christopher, is on the cover of the first anniversary issue. Headlines tout home schooling, teen scene and top toys. Advertisers included schools,doctors, financial advisers, shops, magicians such as Professor Patches and Teco Arena, which became Germain Arena and is now Hertz Arena.

“Not only was I loving parenting my own children, I got to do something I truly loved, and that was being around other parents and children,” Connie says.“A lot of hard work, but it was a labor of love.”

I got to see that labor of love first hand when I became editor in 2005 and got to work with Connie for a couple of years before she pursued another passion.

In 2007, with her husband, Rick Williams, she created CONRIC PR & Marketing, CONRIC being a mashup of their first names, to meet another need: helping small businesses with marketing and rebranding.

“I love watching what you are doing with the magazine every single month,” she tells me, and I’m sure I blushed. “You’ve carried on that legacy. I still hear parents say how incredible it is to have that as a resource.”

Our team today consists of people who aim to give this publication as much heart as Connie. There’s General Manager Kathryn Robinson Kinsey, who is also the editor of Grandeur Magazine, Art Director Lindi Daywalt-Feazel, Specialty Publications Team Coordinator Dennis Wright, and photojournalist Amanda Inscore.

Our gratitude goes out to the great writers and columnists who have written for us over the years, to the advertisers who support our work and to the readers for giving us purpose.

Over the next year, in each issue, we’ll feature a Q&A with people from the covers of Southwest Florida Parent & Child, like Abby Fletcher, then a Cape Coral 12-year-old opera singer on her way to Carnegie Hall. This month, we start with the girl who started it all: Natalie Ramos (who, by the way, is 28 and living in New York City).

That was then…

A lot changes in 20 years. Here’s a look at what a few things cost at the time of our first issue in January 2000, back when $100 had the same buying power as $152.37 today:

  • Disney: $46 for adults, $37 for kids for a one-day Walt Disney World ticket
  • Stamp: 33 cents (they’re 55 cents now in case you haven’t written an actual letter in a few years)
  • Rent: $641 was the median gross rent in Florida (“gross” means it includes utilities)
  • Gasoline: $1.25 for a gallon of regular unleaded
  • Milk: $2.82 for a gallon of whole milk
  • Ground chuck: $1.93 for a pound
  • Salary: In 2000, minimum wage was $5.15. If you made $50,000 in 2000, you’d need to make $76,187 today to have the same buying power.

SOURCES: U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and AllEars.Net