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. Our Kindred by Parents community supports the people raising up a generation of free Black children with lives full of love and joy. Familia reaches 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 The following pledge focuses on three key areas: building a diverse team of people, reviewing and updating our content, and creating community partnerships that align with our 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: 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. Grace Bastidas, Editor-in-Chief I was a single mom for much of my oldest son's early life, and for me, parenting well meant also relying on our chosen family—the friends and community who care for us both. And as a queer parent, I'm grateful my son has always been aware of my relationships with people of different genders; I hope I've been able to model honesty and confidence so he knows the best thing he can be is his truest self. Amelia Edelman, Senior Editorial Director 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. Sugey Palomares, Senior Social Media Editor My partner and I are both immigrant kids, so it’s critical to us that our kids make themselves at home—both here in the United States and abroad. We live in one of the most diverse cities in the world, and we want them to be comfortable in their skin, embracing different languages and cultures, and finding their footing despite the challenges they will no doubt face as kids of color and neurodivergent people. That’s why it’s so important to me—as someone who never saw myself in books or other media growing up—that children like mine are allowed to share their own stories, far and wide, because that representation is truly critical. Sona Charaipotra, Senior Editor, News and Brand Building 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. Sari Hitchins, News Editor 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 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 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 will 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 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 with Everytown, Moms Demand, The Trevor Project, the Ad Council, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the Military’s Department of Defense, and the Biden Administration’s COVID-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