contenteditable only for individual elements, not container

I'm working on a text editor for a recent project. I've discovered the beauty of contenteditable through this, but am still running into some issues.

I like editors like Medium.js, Grande.js, ZenPen, etc, but they all create one overlying container div that is contenteditable. While I could work with that, I'm not very keen on it, and so far it's already caused some setbacks.

What I'd like is an editor in which all individual children in a container - not the container itself - are contenteditable. That itself is simple; bringing a sort of unified functionality between the separate elements is where I'm having a hard time.

I'm not adept in javascript or jQuery - serverside logic is more my thing - but so far i've been attempting an implementation of what I described using a hodgepodge of jQuery insertAfter and related statements. It's not very clean and I'm optimistic there's a better way to accomplish this.

What would be the best way to implement this?