Jenée Desmond-Harris
Jenée Desmond-Harris uses the advice format to dissect the private crises that shape family life, parenting, and relationships, treating letters as reporting on how people actually live. At Slate, she writes the Dear Prudence advice column and hosts its companion podcast, answering detailed questions about intimacy, conflict, and care within households and social circles. Her work stands out for how it links everyday dilemmas to larger questions of identity, obligation, and emotional safety, especially in the context of parenting and intergenerational families.
Dear Prudence: Relationships, Family, and Parenting
Desmond-Harris’s core venue is Dear Prudence, Slate’s long-running advice franchise, where she responds to letters on tangled relationship and family issues in both written columns and weekly audio episodes. She focuses on situations where affection and resentment coexist: couples stuck in recurring battles, adult children frustrated with parents, and friends renegotiating boundaries after major life changes.
Her parenting beat runs through these letters rather than standalone how-to guides; she writes about parent friendships, co-parenting tensions, and the way children’s needs reshape marriages and friendships.
The format is consistent - letters and direct responses - but she treats each as a specific case, drawing out power dynamics, communication patterns, and practical steps instead of generic tips. Her tone is plain and candid, often naming the hard truth a letter writer is avoiding while still outlining realistic ways to act on it.
Parenting Dilemmas and Intergenerational Conflict
Many of Desmond-Harris’s standout pieces look at parenting across generations, where grandparents, parents, and children collide over values and expectations. In the column about a letter writer whose grandparents opposed their parents’ marriage and are now being reassessed, she uses the family story to examine how prejudice, protection, and hindsight coexist in long relationships.
In another column, a parent worries about a daughter who insists there are “no good men left” to date, and Desmond-Harris shifts the focus from the dating pool to the daughter’s patterns and assumptions, turning a surface complaint into a deeper look at self-sabotage.
She writes about a niece feeling left out at college, using that scenario to unpack belonging, family support, and how older relatives can respond without minimizing a young adult’s hurt. Even when the letter is not explicitly labeled as parenting advice, she treats these as questions about how families raise, protect, and launch their children, emphasizing the emotional labor required from adults who are trying to do right by younger relatives.
Friendships, Marriage, and the Work of Staying Connected
Desmond-Harris regularly addresses how parenting intersects with friendships and romantic partnerships. In parenting-focused advice, she explores how to build and sustain parent friendships that provide real support instead of judgment or competition, emphasizing honesty about capacity and the value of pre-existing relationships that can absorb the transition to parenthood.
Her marital advice pieces often zero in on a specific recurring fight - one particular battle couples cannot let go of - and use it as a lens for whether the relationship can adapt or is headed for long-term misery.
Outside Slate, she appears on podcasts and radio segments to talk through these themes in broader conversations, such as discussions about why so many couples are divorcing and what effective relationship advice looks like when separations feel more visible. Across formats, she is interested in the maintenance work of relationships: the check-ins, changed expectations, and sometimes hard endings required to keep families and friendships healthy.
Race, Identity, Wellness, and Parenting
Another strand of Desmond-Harris’s work links parenting and relationships to race, identity, and health culture. In letters about college isolation and family belonging, she attends closely to how racial identity and community norms shape a young person’s sense of being welcomed or excluded.
Her conversations on wellness and infertility treat parenting not just as a set of tasks but as an experience saturated with messages about bodies, food, and “doing it right,” especially for breastfeeding parents navigating children’s sensitivities.
She brings that same lens to advice on food, social media, and self-image, recognizing how parents absorb and pass on wellness narratives. Her prior work at outlets including The New York Times, Vox, and The Root focused on race, politics, and opinion writing, and that background shows in her advice columns, which acknowledge structural pressures without losing sight of what an individual letter writer can concretely change.
The result is coverage that treats parenting and family decisions as both intimate and political, grounded in clear, actionable guidance.
4 more parenting journalists.
Abigail Shrier
Abigail Shrier is a journalist, columnist at The Free Press, and bestselling author whose work centers on parenting, family relationships, and the cultural forces shaping childhood. She writes the weekly “Tough Love” advice column, where readers send hard personal and family dilemmas and she focuses on concrete situations and practical choices for parents, partners, and adult children. She also publishes essays and reported features on parenting that examine how institutions and professionals influence everyday family life, including criminalization of ordinary parental decisions and therapeutic advice that leads to “no contact” with parents. Her books “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up” and “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” extend her reporting on therapy, gender medicine, and youth. She also covers education, gender, speech, activism, and censorship, approaching these subjects as reported arguments.
Alesandra Dubin
Alesandra Dubin uses parenting to examine how travel, independence, and everyday logistics shape family life. She is a digital travel and lifestyle journalist with more than 15 years’ experience covering parenting, travel, food, events, fashion and beauty, entertainment, home, and viral content for consumer and business outlets. Her work has appeared in Insider, Good Housekeeping, Parents, Esquire, Woman’s Day, Prevention, Glamour, Shondaland, AFAR, and TODAY. Her parenting beat centers on family travel, including flights, camps, hotels, destinations, and the ways parents protect their identity and relationships while caring for children. She also covers practical planning, from room layouts and prices to crowds, tickets, transit, pacing, and family-friendly dining. She reports through candid first-person stories, then draws out clear service advice and emotional insights about care, autonomy, stress, and family dynamics.
Alyson Krueger
Alyson Krueger is a freelance journalist who covers how people live, parent, gather and chase status in contemporary culture through reported narratives anchored in specific communities, events and social scenes. She writes for The New York Times and other publications and has contributed to The New York Times since 2013. Her parenting work centers on fatherhood and family rituals, using observed behavior and everyday routines to show changing family roles. She often reports on urban social life and leisure, including how people socialize and find rest in demanding environments, from city winters to shifting ski seasons. Her business and fashion stories examine the social meaning of wellness practices, marketing with superheroes, playful luxury food and gifting. She also covers major events, weddings and fan culture, paying attention to atmosphere, crowds and what draws people together.
Amie Windsor
Amie Windsor links parenting and everyday family life directly to local policy, community crises and governance decisions. She is the Opinion Editor at The Press Democrat and is described by the masthead as the Community Journalism Team Lead, drawing on nearly a decade in community journalism with sustained coverage of city hall and school boards. She writes opinion columns and reported pieces on parenting under democratic stress, wildfire displacement, transportation planning, law enforcement technology and major energy infrastructure decisions. Her parenting work treats raising children as part of civic life under political instability, showing how structural shifts enter routines, emotional labor and family conversations. Her reporting on biking and walking projects, hybrid police cruisers and dam decommissioning keeps policy and infrastructure grounded in specific projects, residents and public processes, emphasizing civic engagement, community resilience and resident-first coverage.