Rachel Garlinghouse
Rachel Garlinghouse writes first-person parenting essays for Business Insider that focus on the tradeoffs, boundaries, and emotional realities of raising children in a busy household. Her work centers on the rules she sets for her family and the reasons behind them, with an emphasis on safety, mental health, and living within practical limits. She uses her own home life as the primary reporting ground, turning everyday decisions into clear, concrete stories about modern parenting.
Parenting Boundaries and Risk
Garlinghouse’s defining thread is parental boundary-setting in situations that many families treat as routine.
In her essay about sleepovers, she lays out why she does not allow her children to attend overnight stays, framing the choice in terms of risk, consent, and the lack of control over other adults’ behavior. She writes about keeping her children off social media because of bullying concerns and her own experience with online threats, presenting the decision as a deliberate refusal of a common milestone rather than a simple restriction.
Across these pieces, she treats rules not as abstract guidelines but as specific, lived policies, explaining both the fears and the values that shape them.
Family Life, Stress, and Mental Health
Her coverage also dwells on the psychological weight of parenting and the need for deliberate rest.
In a summer essay, she describes setting a single seasonal goal for her family: doing less, with fewer scheduled activities and more unstructured time. She explores how excused mental health days from school give her children space to reset, treating those days as a legitimate part of their overall wellbeing rather than an indulgence. In another piece, she describes closing her bedroom door to create a brief retreat from children and pets, showing how small acts of separation help sustain her capacity to care for them.
Together, these stories emphasize that managing family stress is an active practice, with boundaries drawn not only for safety but also for emotional preservation.
Money, Time, and Big-Household Logistics
Garlinghouse often writes about the financial and logistical realities of raising several children. In her essay on family vacations, she explains how trips have become too expensive, detailing rising costs and the strain of paying for travel for a larger household.
She uses that scenario to examine the tradeoffs between traditional vacation expectations and what the family budget can handle, highlighting closer-to-home options and reframing what counts as a worthwhile break.
Elsewhere, she describes the everyday chaos of a busy home - children, pets, and constant demands - and the strategies she uses to keep the environment manageable, such as carving out private space and accepting limits on how much activity the family can absorb. These pieces distinguish her coverage from generic parenting advice by focusing on concrete constraints and the specific adjustments they force.
Health, Body, and Parenting in Hard Times
Another strand of her work addresses illness, body image, and how parents present vulnerability to their children.
In an essay about undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, she recounts losing her hair and deciding not to wear a wig, describing how that choice intersected with her identity and how her family saw her during treatment. In a separate story, she writes about her children seeing her naked, arguing that the exposure is less about shock and more about teaching comfort with bodies, boundaries, and openness. These pieces show her willingness to use intimate details to explore how parents model resilience and self-acceptance, even when circumstances are physically and emotionally difficult.
Across health and body-focused essays, she stays close to specific moments and decisions, rather than broad slogans, giving communications around sensitive topics a clear sense of the issues she engages.
Overall, Garlinghouse’s work is consistent in tone and method: short, direct essays anchored in a single family decision or challenge, with a clear explanation of why she chooses the path she does.
She gravitates toward stories where conventional expectations - sleepovers, social media, vacations, nonstop activities - collide with safety concerns, mental health needs, and financial limits, and she writes plainly about choosing the quieter, more controlled option. That focus makes her coverage distinct from more general parenting service content; she is less interested in universal tips and more focused on documenting the lived consequences of firm boundaries in a modern, busy household.
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.