In the late 1980s, early 1990s, I freelanced for a magazine called Parenting. (The magazine stopped publishing in 2013, though an online incarnation lives on.) It had a total annual circulation of 2.2 million readers, and it was pretty ubiquitous for many years—always present in pediatricians’ offices and in libraries, for example. In short, a lot of people--women mostly, of course--read it. It may seem anachronistic today, but up until the early 2000s, many people got a lot of different kinds of information from magazines.
Once mass culture succeeded in vilifying earlier generations, or at least in convincing younger people that their circumstances were so singular that nothing that had come before could possibly be worth referring to or heeding, something needed to fill that informational vacuum. This was a brave new world, and it needed to be co-invented with all the experts, marketers, advertisers, and content producers of the time. Calling your Mom or Aunt Lulli to understand something was so 1950. By the 1960s, we had magazines, and books, and groups of peers to steer us.
We subbed out the input of people who genuinely cared about us and plugged in the ideas and biases of people we didn’t know from Adam, whose motivations were not linked to our well-being. Not everybody did this, of course, but lots did.
Parenting magazine covered a lot of nuts-and-bolts topics, as well as more complicated issues, including articles on postpartum depression; the advantages of cloth vs. disposable diapers; and what a first-time parent should expect from a typical battery of newborn tests.
Most—though not all--of the writers and columnists were parents themselves; that would usually be clear from the bios that ran with their articles. Here’s what was interesting: The editorial staff, with a couple of exceptions, were largely childless, or had little contact with their children if they had them. And a reader would never know this because, while the editorial staff was listed on the masthead at the front of the magazine, it was just names on a page; there was no information about any of them included. At Parenting, the editor was a single woman with no children; the editor-in-chief had two kids, but was divorced, and his children lived primarily with their mom; and various editors of different departments, both men and women, were young and childless at the time, though, to be fair, there were also a few departmental editors who had children. Writers would pitch ideas that editors would greenlight or not, but the editorial staff was responsible not only for gatekeeping what got into the magazine and what didn’t, but also for generating a lot of article ideas in-house.
Thus, other considerations--besides what might be most interesting to real live parents because, mostly, the editorial staff didn’t have the lived experience that might steer them--informed decisions about what to include. So editorial policy was in great part determined by what the editors’ (largely) 25yo or 30yo childless sensibilities suggested it should be, combined with a lot of concern for the “needs” of their advertisers. Parenting, like nearly all magazines of the era, survived thanks to ad revenue, not subscription costs. You’d see this, for example, in the “debates” about cloth vs. disposable diapers. A lot of disposable diaper companies advertised in the magazine. So any such debate would have to tilt toward disposables, or come up a “draw” (that still tilted toward disposables). Disposable diaper ads in the issue where that kind of story ran would be placed in the magazine after and throughout the article on the topic. Cuz that’s how it’s done.
I remember one editor, who did have a couple of children, wrote a piece one year for a spring issue on three garden projects for parents to do with or for their kids. I think it was called “Adventure Garden.” I still remember the projects: a green bean teepee, a tomato tunnel, and a pea arch—spaces designed to become leafy sanctuaries throughout the growing season where a toddler or elementary-aged child could chill out and snack on the veggie offerings. Anybody with young children who might have the space for a project like that understands the appeal immediately. Yet that editor had a lot of trouble pushing the story through because of her colleagues’ resistance to it. I remember her saying to me, “This is what parents want!” Indeed.
But: There was no advertiser tie-in, and if you don’t have kids, maybe you just can’t see the charm. Although we’re all former children, yes? And surely you can remember how fun it was to hide away in that kind of space?
I wrote for another magazine, Family Fun, which was kind of a whole publication dedicated to the Adventure Garden idea. It was about cooking, traveling, making things, parties, activities, doing stuff together as a family. I got to work on it early in its life when some really creative and interesting people were on board. It did so well that it attracted the attention of Disney, which bought it after a little more than a year of publication. I had contracted to do a piece for the magazine before the Disney purchase, which was due after the transaction was complete. My piece was a roundup of favorite projects from award-winning teachers from around the country that could easily be adapted for family use. I was given a list of teachers, and researched others on my own. I had conducted a number of the interviews with some very imaginative teachers who had absolutely fantastic projects to share with the magazine’s readers. Then my editor reached out and told me that, now that Disney was the owner, I was only to use teachers who had received a Disney American Teacher Award, which honors creativity in teaching. I received a new list of teachers to contact. So back to Square One. This new crop of teachers was also interesting, and had very good projects, but several of the projects from the first group were simply superior. Of course, they couldn’t be included because they didn’t shine a light on the greatness of the new owner.
There were other magazines about having and raising children. Two other biggies were Parents and Child. Between 2005 and 2013, the Meredith Corporation, a colossal media conglomerate that owned oodles of TV and radio stations, magazines, and web sites, gobbled up Parenting, Parents, Child, and Family Fun, among lots of other titles. It made sense, because those publications existed to funnel consumers to their advertisers, and they all pretty much had the same or very similar advertisers, resulting ultimately in pretty consistent content that toed the party line. Even Family Fun, which had started out fresh and vital and kind of different, became flatter and more anodyne under Disney’s watchful eye. So becoming part of a single media blob made a kind of gorey sense for these publications. (In 2021, Meredith was swallowed by IAC, an even bigger American corporation. Enormity makes greater control and more homogeneity way easier.)
I’d like to mention another magazine from that epoch, Mothering, for which I also did some writing. Mothering’s tagline was “The magazine of natural family living.” It predated most of the others mentioned here, having begun publishing in 1976, and it had a different audience, as it advocated homebirth and waterbirth; breastfeeding; homeschooling; and cosleeping. So this publication offered mothers who wanted alternatives a kind of tribal gathering place. It was more homespun, which was much of its charm, but caused it to misstep when it veered into coverage of certain medical topics. I remember an author who wrote about her decision not to have her newborn tested for phenylketonuria (PKU). A blood sample from a baby’s heel is routinely taken to rule out PKU, a rare metabolic disorder that, left untreated, can result in intellectual disability and physical health problems. If detected early, those challenges can be avoided by following a special diet. This author encouraged others to reject the test for their babies in order to spare the newborn that heel prick because of the rarity of the condition.
Mothering magazine, unlike many other parenting magazines, had no fact-checking staff. The fact checkers literally identify every fact claimed in any article and check each for veracity. This is an important hedge against liability issues, as well as an opportunity to do right informationally by your readers.. And this lack was where the homespun aspect of Mothering became a problem. There was a real outcry after the PKU article was published. To the magazine’s credit, they published many of the criticisms in the next issue’s Letters To The Editor section. Readers were furious that the editors had allowed something so irresponsible and flaky to make it into the magazine’s pages; some even marveled that the fact checkers had allowed it to slip through. The Mothering staff did not share with readers that there were no fact-checkers.
So what’s my point? Nowadays, we might wonder if something we read is hand rolled by a human or cooked up by ChatGPT. But the question of what information we have access to and why, and its corollary: What’s getting left out?—those are old questions.
Have you heard that metaphor using clapping to describe how difficult it is to come up with genuinely fresh, new ideas? It’s easy to clap along with everybody else; it’s a little harder but still very doable to clap in the offbeats when everyone else isn’t clapping. It’s quit hard to clap an entirely different rhythm against what everyone else is doing, e.g., trying to clap triplets or sevens when everyone else is clapping on every beat in 4/4 time.
Parenting and its ilk were like everyone clapping on the beat in 4/4; Mothering was clapping on the offbeats. Other, more unusual initiatives were difficult to find or to keep alive.
Now we have all that the internet has to offer, literally at our fingertips. It’s too much to sift through; on many sites, creepily, we’re the product that’s being consumed; and we all know it’s not good for us to spend hours staring at screens. BUT we have an accessible, glorious plurality of voices; finding one that you vibe with often leads to finding more. Personally, I’m heartened and encouraged and often enlightened by the content and comments that I read on favorite blogs and substacks. It just seems to me, more and more, that there are a lot of smart, vital humans out there thinking, writing, doing interesting things. When you read an author’s work directly, it hasn’t been curated by an editorial staff that has to serve corporate sponsors. It also doesn’t have the benefit of a dedicated fact-checking staff. And it’s not the same as gathering in community spaces for discussions and conversations. But let’s celebrate it for all that’s good about it, particularly the way it gives voice to the marginal, the quirky, the unusual.