Last updated May 2024
Here at Parents, we believe in the importance of equity, justice, and representation for all—including and especially the most marginalized among us. Through the content we create and share with our audiences, we aim to show the full breadth of what it means to be a parent or caregiver today, to highlight moments of solidarity and joy while helping families make decisions that align with their values.
To hold ourselves accountable, we commit to an ongoing Diversity and Inclusion Pledge. This detailed promise outlines our plans to ensure that our content reflects the diversity of our nation and our readers. We want you to see yourself in our stories.
We strive to do better in uplifting family experiences by centering stories that celebrate heritage, identity, and community. We aim to shine a spotlight on all family structures and ways individuals come together to create villages and raise the next generation.
We work to create inclusive content that speaks to families of varying backgrounds, structures, and dynamics — and work to defy stereotypes and tropes that don’t serve our modern villages. Some examples of our work include:
- Kindred by Parents: Black Joy Featuring Kelly Rowland
- How Parents Can Best Empower and Support Their LGBTQIA+ Child
- The Unapologetically Black Tradition of Expanding the Definition of Family
- Eurocentric Beauty Standards Begin To Affect Black Girls at 10 Years Old—but Parents Can Help
- Hablemos: How Do I Talk To My Family About Colorism?
- Families Are Forming Between Friends—Here's How Platonic Parenting Works
- The New Face of Working Parents
- It Takes a Village: What Child Care Really Looks Like in America
The following pledge focuses on three key areas: building a diverse team of people, reviewing and updating our content to align with anti-bias best practices, and fostering engaging community spaces for our readers that align with our core values.
People
We are committed to fostering diversity in Parents leadership and staff.
As of May 30, 2024, the editorial team at Parents includes 14 full-time editors who guide our content to become more in-depth and inclusive. Seven of our editorial team members self-identify as white, 2 as Black, 4 as Latine and 1 as Asian; 12 self-identify as female, one self-identifies as male and one as non-binary. Of this team, 3 staffers identify as LGBTQ+ and 1 as neurodivergent.
Every family looks different, and we celebrate the diversity of our Parents team members and their families:
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As a first-generation Latina, I am raising my daughters in a bilingual home. While my husband is from England and doesn’t speak much Spanish, we somehow make it work. Living in New York means we hear different languages all the time, so it’s great that my girls can embrace cultural diversity because they’re also living it.
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As a member of the LGBTQ+ community who has been blessed with an accepting and loving birth family alongside my joyful found family, it feels essential to help build a world for the next generation where young people know that they’ll be lovingly affirmed just the way they are. That’s why I’m so passionate about creating spaces that foster a deep appreciation of our differences and similarities, encourage curiosity and combat stigma and shame.
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As a biracial and multicultural family, we are always looking for ways to connect our two kids to their Cuban, Puerto Rican, Argentine, and Chinese heritage. That means trying our best to be intentional about the books we read, the foods we eat, the stories we tell, and the languages we speak at home. While I haven’t mastered the art of passing down my Spanish-speaking skills just yet, it’s an ongoing process rooted in love and patience. I want my kids to live in a world where they feel seen, heard, understood, and valued. That begins with nurturing diverse communities and creating narratives that celebrate all of us.
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Where I grew up wasn't the most diverse. I was one of only a few Jewish kids in my high school class. Now as a parent, I'm proud to bring my girls up in a town that's not only diverse in religions but also ethnicities and cultures. It's so important for them to learn about seeing the world from all different perspectives.
We prioritize the ongoing diversification of the Parents contributor network.
In 2022, we launched our Expert Review Board with diverse members who have elite expertise in topics we speak to as a brand including health, education, and nutrition. These advisors review our content for accuracy in their areas of expertise. Our current review board includes 56 members. Of these members, 15 completed a survey to self-identify their race. Of the 15, 5 identify as Black, 4 as Asian, 2 as multiracial, and 4 as white.
Beyond our full-time staff, our team has worked tirelessly to expand our network to be more inclusive of parents of all genders, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds to further diversify the voices we feature on our site and better represent our readership. We challenge ourselves to continue to work with a robust network of contributors, writers, and reporters from all walks of life.
Content
We review all of our content with a critical lens.
All Parents content is reviewed for factual accuracy and sensitivity by professional journalists and a board of expert reviewers who work in the fields we cover. Each new article follows the standards in our style guide — a living document we continually update to ensure the language we use is always affirming, inclusive, and self-aware. And as our language choices evolve, we apply these changes by updating existing articles.
Some examples of our style:
We ask people featured in our content how they would like to be identified or described and use identity-first language.
We support all bodies, acknowledge that bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and focus on overall health and nutrition.
We do not use phrases such as “natural birth,” or “breast is best,” and instead speak to personal experience as well as the latest peer-reviewed science.
We state pronouns and use gender-inclusive language such as “pregnant person” and “chestfeeding.”
We support gender diversity. For example, we acknowledge that not all people with testes identify as men, and not all birthing people identify as women.
Dotdash Meredith’s Anti-Bias Review Board has reviewed hundreds of articles that represent more than 70% of our traffic. In 2023 we successfully remediated 85% of this content to ensure that it is inclusive in language and perspectives based on the expert recommendations of our Anti-Bias Review Board Partners. We continue to work on the remaining 15% and more, to address instances of gender and sexuality bias, race bias, ableist bias, and class bias in our content. Our team continues to attend regular Anti-Bias trainings throughout the year as well as listening to our community when they express needs or concerns to ensure our content honors the diversity of our readership.
We are committed to greater representation in our visual assets.
When you come to Parents, we want you to see families who look like yours. We prioritize showing diversity of families in our photos and illustrations by working with our internal visuals team to source appropriate photography that reflects the culture of each article, as well as working with illustrators who understand the nuance of identity.
Community
Both our Kindred by Parents and Familia by Parents communities offer spaces that elevate and center the cultural stories that matter to Black and Latine families.
Kindred by Parents supports the people raising up a generation of free Black children with lives full of love and joy.
Familia by Parents reaches multicultural Latine families passing on their values, traditions, and heritage to their children.
To Our Readers
We promise to uphold the actions of this pledge to the best of our ability and address our shortcomings along the way. We will be sharing updates on our progress here each quarter and will continue to hold ourselves accountable to the standard of reporting that you have come to expect from Parents.
Thank you for being a loyal reader and being a part of the nearly 100-year legacy of Parents.
Your feedback is valuable and helps us learn what we can do better as we continue to raise the next generation of confident and compassionate kids and build a better future. Please email us at: contact@parents.com.
Sincerely,