Our Diversity & Inclusion Pledge Last updated February 2023 Here at Parents, we believe in the importance of equity, justice, and representation for 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 are committing to a 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. Parents Latina 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 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 February 1, 2023, the editorial team at Parents includes 14 full-time editors who guide our content to become more in-depth and inclusive. Of these editorial members, 7 self-identify as white, 3 as Black, 3 as Latinx, and 1 as Asian. Of this team, 14 self-identify as female. Every family looks different and we celebrate the diversity of family of our Parents team members: Grace Bastidas, Editor-in-Chief ”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 Amelia Edelman, Senior Editorial Director "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 Melissa Mills, Associate Editorial Director ”I’m lucky to have a very hands-on village to help make sure that both my husband and I can work full-time and our two boys, 3.5 and 1, are happy, healthy, and taken care of. My parents and sister are part of our child care team and they’re all in the process of moving into our neighborhood to be even more involved.“ — Melissa Mills, Associate Editorial Director Sugey Palomares, Senior Social Media Editor “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 Melissa Bykofsky, Editorial Director, Trends & Features "I loved growing up with strong family traditions rooted in our values and culture. Now my husband and I try to bring some of those same moments into our toddler's life. We go out for pancakes as a family most Saturdays to honor a tradition my husband loved with his dad who has since passed. My dad still makes us latkes every Hanukkah with the same recipe I loved when I was young. We're also finding ways to start new traditions that are special to us. — Melissa Bykofsky, Editorial Director, Trends & Features We will prioritize further diversifying 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 will review all of our content with a critical lens. All Parents content will be 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 are body-positive, promote diversity in body shape and size, 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. 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 70% of our traffic and during 2023, we plan to remediate this content and ensure that it is inclusive in language and perspectives based on the expert recommendations of our Anti-Bias Review Board Partners. We are working to address instances of gender and sexuality bias, race bias, ableist biased, and class bias in our content. We are also in the process of updating the 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 will prioritize showing more diversity of families in our photos and illustrations by working with our internal visual team to source appropriate photography that reflects the culture of each article and work with illustrators who understand the nuance of identity. Community We will 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 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