Madeleine Kearns
Madeleine Kearns is an editor and writer at The Free Press who covers parenting and family life at the point where intimate decisions meet culture, politics, and faith. Her work brings together articles on early childhood and fertility with regular newsletter columns that place those stories inside broader debates over education, religion, and medical ethics. She draws on experience in opinion and magazine journalism to treat parenting choices as part of larger questions about how people form families and pass on values.
Sleep Training and Early Childhood
One strand of Kearns’s parenting coverage focuses on the first year of life and the conflicts that erupt around sleep training. In “Moms Are at War Over Sleep Training,” she explains the “cry it out” method as a hardcore form of sleep training in which parents selectively ignore a baby’s cries at night to teach independent sleep, and she presents it as a controversial practice. By centering the decision of whether to let a baby cry, she uses a specific routine to show how different philosophies of parenting and maternal identity collide.
The article’s plain, descriptive language spells out what sleep training looks like in practice rather than relying on technical jargon, signaling a style that is accessible to parents already in the thick of these choices.
Fertility, IVF, and Family Formation
Beyond day-to-day parenting, Kearns pushes into the beginnings of family life through coverage of fertility and assisted reproduction. Under The Free Press’s Fertility tag, she contributes work such as “I’m an IVF Doctor,” engaging directly with reproductive medicine and the realities of in vitro fertilization for people trying to build families. By foregrounding IVF specialists and the treatment experience, she extends her parenting beat backward in time to the challenges of conception, medical intervention, and the emotional weight of trying to have children.
This line of coverage positions her as a useful interlocutor for stories that involve fertility medicine, ethical questions around reproductive technology, or the long journey into parenthood.
Education, Culture, and the Family
Kearns also writes The Front Page, a daily newsletter for The Free Press that serves as a window into both the outlet’s reporting and the wider news cycle.
In one edition, “Inside America’s Education Revolution. Plus…,” she surveys upheaval in American schooling, underscoring how changes in education policy and practice affect families and the options available to parents.
Other Front Page installments she authors draw together stories on campus unrest, federal politics, and debates over “gender-affirming care,” showing her interest in how institutions and expert bodies shape the environment in which parents raise children. This recurring format highlights her capacity to move quickly across topics while keeping an eye on the way schools, universities, medical associations, and governments intersect with family life.
Faith, Conversion, and Passing on Belief
Religion and belief are another recurring thread in Kearns’s work, and they intersect with her focus on family and formation. In “How Catholicism Got Cool,” she reports from a packed, candlelit church in Greenwich Village where adults prepare for baptism, capturing both the atmosphere and the stories of people choosing a new religious identity.
The subject matter connects faith and belonging with life-stage decisions that resonate inside families, from how adults reshape their own beliefs to how they might raise children within a tradition. This attention to contemporary religious life complements her parenting and education coverage, rounding out a portfolio that treats family as social, spiritual, and cultural as well as practical.
Kearns’s current work at The Free Press builds on a background as a staff writer at National Review and bylines in outlets including The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, and UnHerd. That mix of magazine, opinion, and reported writing informs her approach to parenting stories, which sit alongside pieces on politics, education, culture, and religion in her broader body of work. For stories that touch sleep training, IVF and fertility care, schooling and campus life, or the role of faith in modern families, her coverage shows a consistent interest in how private choices are shaped by public arguments and institutions.
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.