Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung writes Slate’s Care and Feeding parenting advice column, using reader letters about families, caregiving, and children as a starting point for careful, emotionally literate guidance. Her work on this beat stands out for the way she treats everyday parenting questions as complex moral decisions shaped by relationships, history, and structural pressures. Alongside this column, she writes widely about family, identity, class, and grief, so her parenting coverage is grounded in a broader understanding of how private crises sit inside larger social realities.
Care and Feeding parenting advice column
At Slate, Chung’s work is anchored in Care and Feeding, the masthead’s parenting advice column. The format is consistent: readers send in detailed letters describing a problem with their children, partners, or relatives, and she responds with a long, reasoned answer that combines concrete steps with reflection on values and long-term consequences. Recent columns have covered conflicts over discipline methods, questions about common parenting philosophies, and fears that popular approaches such as “gentle” parenting are producing entitled or poorly behaved children. She routinely separates immediate behavior from the underlying relationship, encouraging parents and caregivers to think about trust, communication, and the child’s perspective rather than relying only on control or punishment. Her advice often acknowledges the pressures parents face - workload, burnout, isolation - and treats these as part of the problem to be solved, not just background noise.
Extended families, boundaries, and caregiving
Many of Chung’s Care and Feeding columns focus on the tensions that arise when grandparents, in-laws, and other relatives are deeply involved in childcare. She writes about situations in which older relatives feel trapped in ongoing “grandma duties,” resent expectation-heavy arrangements, or contemplate major life changes - such as moving away - to escape obligations that have become unsustainable.
Her responses in these cases pay close attention to boundaries and consent: she distinguishes between freely offered help and coerced or assumed labor, and presses letter writers to articulate what they are actually willing and able to do. Chung also handles letters in which a relative worries that another caregiver’s choices are harming a child, weighing the ethics of intervention, the limits of their authority, and the potential fallout within the family.
In this extended-family sub-beat, she often reframes “being a good relative” as including honesty about limits and a willingness to renegotiate expectations instead of silently enduring resentment.
Behavior, development, and emotional growth
Another recurring thread in her parenting work is children’s behavior and developmental understanding - how kids learn about boundaries, truth, and the consequences of their actions. Chung responds to letters about young children with unusual habits or “talents” that are socially disruptive, helping caregivers differentiate between developmentally normal experimentation and patterns that need clear correction and guidance.
She also writes about older children and adolescents, including cases where a parent is trying to repair past harms or reconsider how they treated peers in high school, connecting those personal histories to present-day relationships and empathy. Her advice frequently foregrounds communication with children: she asks parents to explain the difference between reality and imagination, to name feelings, and to show how rules relate to safety or respect rather than arbitrary authority.
Across these pieces, she treats emotional growth as a central parenting goal, giving as much weight to understanding, accountability, and self-knowledge as to outward compliance.
Broader writing on family, identity, and class
Outside Slate, Chung is a widely published essayist and memoirist whose work centers on adoption, family, identity, class, and grief. She has written books of memoir and long-form essays that examine her own history and the structures that shape family life, including economic precarity and unequal access to care.
She is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a regular contributor to Time, and her essays have appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, GQ, The Guardian, and other major publications.
This broader portfolio gives her parenting advice a distinctive texture: letters about caregiving and family conflict are often read through a lens that acknowledges class, health, and systemic inequality alongside individual choices. For story ideas that touch adoption, nontraditional families, caregiving burdens, or the emotional fallout of economic and health crises, her work shows a consistent interest in the intersection of intimate experience and structural constraint.
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.