Our Diversity & Inclusion Pledge

Last updated May 2023

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 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.

OurKindred by Parentscommunity supports the people raising up a generation of free Black children with lives full of love and joy.Familiareaches multicultural families passing on their values, traditions, and heritage to their children.

We create inclusive content that speaks to families of varying backgrounds, structures, and dynamics. Some examples of our work include:

• 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?
• States Are Making Shared Custody the Default—Could This Be the Arrangement We've Been Waiting For?
• Families Are Forming Between Friends—Here's How Platonic Parenting Works
• Here's How to Empower Your Neurodivergent Child
• The New Face of Working Parents
• It Takes a Village: What Child Care Really Looks Like in America
• How to Talk to Kids About Anti-Asian Violence
  

以下承诺集中在三个关键领域:building a diverse team of people, reviewing and updating our content, and creating community partnerships that align withour core values.

People

We are committed to fostering diversity in Parents leadership and staff.

As of May 30, 2023, 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, 3 as Latinx, and 1 as Asian; 14 self-identify as female and one as non-binary. Of this team, 3 staffers identify as LGBTQ+ and 2 as neurodivergent.

Every family looks different, and we celebrate the diversity of family of our Parents team members:

We prioritize the ongoing diversification of the Parents contributor network.

In 2022, we launched ourExpert Review Boardwith 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 21 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.

We also work with a robust network of contributors, writers, and reporters from all walks of life. We regularly give opportunities to new voices who can offer a different perspective or relay a personal experience that might otherwise go unheard.

Recent stories that reflect the diversity of voices contributing to our site:

• Latinx Families Are Learning To Leave Hustle Culture Behind
• 5 Steps That Helped Me Learn To Forgive My Parents
• The DACA Program Is Always Under Threat—My Family Is Too
• More Black Celebs Are Coming Out and Showing Us How To Support the Queer Folks in Our Families
• Here's How I’m Overcoming My Fear of Blended Families Post-Divorce
• I Love My Diverse Community—I Still Want My Kids to Cherish Their Blackness
• 5 Things I Learned After Becoming a Single Mother and Widow at 40
  

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 ourstyle 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 will apply these changes by updating existing articles.

Some examples of our style:

• 我们问人们他们是如何出现在我们的内容ld 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 usegender-inclusive languagesuch 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’sAnti-Bias Review Boardhas reviewed hundreds of articles that represent more than 70% of our traffic and so far in 2023 has 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.

We are also in the process of overhauling our taxonomies—categories in our site’s navigation—to make them more gender-inclusive and supportive of non-biological caregivers and the “villages” that make up modern families.

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

We explore and develop partnerships with organizations that support inclusivity and diversity of families.

In the last year, we have partnered withEverytown,Moms Demand,The Trevor Project, theAd Council, theEconomic Hardship Reporting Project, theMilitary’s Department of Defense, and the Biden Administration’sCOVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.

We are committed to greater representation in our visual assets.

We will continue to seek out relationships with organizations that share our mission of conscious social impact and justice for families.

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,

The Parents Editorial Team