Phoebe Arslanagic-Little
Phoebe Arslanagic-Little writes about how policy, work, and social norms shape whether people can start and raise families, with a focus on parenting and fertility. At Works in Progress Magazine, she produces long-form essays and newsletters that connect demographic data, social science, and everyday life to debates on childcare, family policy, and women’s work. Her work is grounded in a clear through-line: using evidence to test popular claims about parenting and to show how institutions either support or obstruct family formation. Alongside her writing, she works in the think tank world and co-founded Boom, a platform devoted to pronatalism and family policy.
Daycare pseudoscience
In her piece on daycare pseudoscience, Arslanagic-Little examines claims that non-parental childcare harms children and treats them as questions that can be answered from decades of developmental research. She focuses on large, long-running studies of children in different care arrangements, highlighting that findings are mixed and that strong negative effects do not show up consistently across high-quality research.
The article stresses that if daycare had a clear and sizeable effect on children’s outcomes, it would be visible in the accumulated evidence by now, and that this absence matters more than isolated alarming statistics.
She also pushes back against moralised debates, arguing that families should be encouraged to choose the childcare options that work best for them without fearing that a widely used arrangement is secretly damaging their children. The piece shows her method: careful reading of the evidence, attention to study design and effect sizes, and a refusal to treat parental anxieties as settled science.
Parenting as a public good
In Parenting as a public good, Arslanagic-Little argues that raising children produces benefits that spill over far beyond the household, and that policy should treat parenting more like a shared infrastructure than a purely private choice. She uses survey data across OECD countries to show that women’s ideal number of children is slightly above two, while actual fertility falls short of these stated preferences. The gap between desired and realised family size is presented not as personal failure but as a structural problem shaped by housing, work, childcare, and the design of welfare systems.
She traces how existing policy frameworks often recognise education or healthcare as public goods but leave the work of parenting under-compensated and under-supported, even though future taxpayers and caregivers are produced in the home.
The article combines quantitative evidence with institutional detail, mapping how different policies - such as transfers, leave entitlements, and childcare provision - interact with parents’ time and financial constraints. This approach reflects her broader preoccupation with designing systems that make it practically easier for people to have the number of children they say they want.
Two is already too many
Arslanagic-Little’s essay on South Korea’s fertility crisis, Two is already too many, uses a single country case to show how extreme institutional trade-offs can drive birth rates to unprecedented lows. She challenges the common claim that financial subsidies simply “do not work” by showing that Korean policies do increase births, but that their effect is small relative to the pressures created by career-motherhood tradeoffs, high child-rearing costs, and entrenched gender norms.
The piece details how long working hours, rigid career ladders, and intense education competition make having even one child feel incompatible with a stable professional trajectory, especially for women.
She links these conditions to decades of prior antinatalist policy and social messaging, arguing that the current crisis is the cumulative result of institutional decisions rather than a sudden cultural turn against family life. The essay illustrates her habit of combining demographic statistics with lived constraints, showing how abstract fertility rates emerge from concrete decisions about time, work, and money. It also connects back to her larger argument that if societies want higher fertility, they must change the tradeoffs faced by parents rather than simply urging them to have more children.
Fermenting revolution
Beyond childcare and fertility, Arslanagic-Little writes about how food technology and domestic work reshape women’s lives and family structures. In Fermenting revolution, she describes the scientific and technological battle against bad bread and links improvements in food quality and convenience to changes in women’s time use and labour outside the home. She shows how mundane innovations - better bread, safer milk, more reliable food systems - alter the daily workload of caregiving and household management, freeing time and energy that can be spent on paid work, political engagement, or additional children.
Her piece Making American milk safe similarly connects regulatory history and industrial advances to the security parents feel about feeding their children, and situates these changes within broader progress in public health. In her Links in Progress newsletters, she regularly reviews developments in pronatalism and family policy, scanning new research, pilots, and campaigns around the world and assessing how they might shift the constraints on family formation.
These strands share a consistent focus: she treats parenting not as a lifestyle niche but as something shaped by technology, regulation, and organised advocacy, and writes from a vantage point that combines her role as a writer, co-founder of Boom, and participant in the think tank community.
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.