Reviews For Parents Magazine

I liked this magazine more when I was pregnant and was dreaming about mommyhood. Now that I am a mom and have been reading it for a year I feel like the articles are repeating themselves and are quite superficial. I get more insights now out of the parenting books and articles about children in our local paper (Boston Globe).

As is true of most of the mainstream parenting magazines, I find the articles almost exclusively geared toward mothers, rather than (both) parents -- only rarely to fathers. Perhaps this is a little less true of this pub. than of its chief competitor, "Parenting." The voice of the articles often specifically addresses the mother/female half of the parenting team and the features with beauty tips in the "taking care of yourself" vain are pure fluff, more appropriate to 'Vogue' or 'Self' and of course, again, never addressing the male half of the parent team.

I agree with other reviewers who have noted that the general tone of many of the articles seem to be mostly aimed at upper income, traditional families. While we can often find something of interest/use in this mag. As'older' (over 40) parents of a 3-yr. old transculturally adopted daughter, this targetting is makes the magazine less useful than it could be. As the 'father' half of the team, I find it even less helpful, although, if I had to choose between this pub. and "Parenting" I would opt. for this one.

I guess the marketeers believe that fathers don't read magazines about parenting, and saddly maybe this is mostly true, but I would love to see a magazine that is truely devoted to parenthood -- all types and all both halves. This ain't it.

I will not be renewing. This magazine is such a quick read that I will leave it to physician reception areas.

The magazine itself is good, a lot to read but always in the same "tune" that all children magazines are. I guess as editors for magazines about kids and pregnant women they run out of themes pretty fast (!!) and also I wonder why is it that the magazine insists (no ofense here to anybody) on having very, very white kids with light eyes on the cover... A only pink rainbow would not be as much fun as the full color one, would it?

I'm really, really, sick of the onslaught on advertising since my daughter was born. Not a week goes by where we haven't stuffed the recycle bin to the ceiling with catalogs (unsolicited!) and other junk mail. If Parents didn't have ads and if the articles were more political instead of just more tips on what to buy, buy, buy -- I guess it'd be a different magazine! No really, I found some of the articles mildly interesting but not at all groundbreaking and it's so deeply mired in the same old, same old of this consumer culture of ours that I felt nauseated flipping through it. Spend some time with your kid instead of reading this junk.


Recommended:
No

I have been getting parents for about a year and a half now. I must say, that I am not as pleased with their magazine than other parent magazines.
In the December issue an mother was having problems with her child about lying and it said that of course, honesty is the best policy. Three pages later, in an article about children learning about Santa Claus, they said that it was okay to lie to their child about it. What's the deal? Does this mean that it's okay for grown ups to lie to their kids, but if the vice versa occurs we're supposed to discipline our children??
Also, I've noticed that Parents, though they deal with issues relating to a child's age, they're not as informative about the children ages 3-5 as they are with pregnancy, and older children. (Two things of which are of no interest to me with an 11 month old, a 3 year old, and a 5 year old, and no ability to have more children.) So, when I get an issue of Parents magazine, I look at about 3 articles that deal with the ages of my children, gaze QUICKLY at the clothing in the magazine that I could NEVER afford, and then the magazine goes into the craft box for my children to cut up. Not very helpful then, is it?



Recommended:
No

I subscribed to a year of Parents this pregnancy and ended up feeling my money was not well spent. Though many articles are interesting to read, I found too little new information to add to my experience as a parent. I suppose that means that if you were a new parent and hadn't walked any of the paths before, you might find more information useful.

However, I also found the advice given often much too mainstream and often even inaccurate when it came to what I consider some important basics like breastfeeding.

I would, instead, suggest a subscription to Mothering magazine. Your money will be much better spent on quality advice and thought provoking topics.


Recommended:
No

I subscribed to this after my daughter was around 1 year and, being a stay at home mom, thought I might be able to sneak in a magazine article here and there. What better magazine to subscribe to than one focused on the raising of my darling baby girl? What a mistake! There are 2 types of material in this magazine; alarmist and inane. In fairness, there is occasionally a slightly interesting tidbit that doesn't cause me to immediately throw the thing down in disgust.

I don't fully fault the magazine for all of this as I've noticed that all periodicals seem to be catering to the lowest common denominator as of late. But honestly, the average article seems to assume that most parents are either complete morons or possibly 12 years old. Maybe it's because I'm 33 instead of 23, but I find the majority of the advice to be either extremely obvious or downright ridiculous. I do not need to be told to spend time with my child and I find it unhelpful to make parents think their child is Autistic because their one year old doesn't always look up from their toys when their name is called.

Then there's the household tips. In every issue, there seems to be tons of helpful tips to streamline the management of your home. These are the sort of silly "thirteen different ways to use a laundry basket" that some people may find interesting, but I do not. If I need a shelf, I install a shelf rather than hanging a laundry basket from some hooks. Honestly I feel like I've lost IQ points after reading this magazine. Sometimes I think it would have been more educational to watch The View - and that would have been free.

I give the magazine 2 stars because there is occasionally something interesting in it. I have also seen worse. But if you are an actual adult, have some common sense and want to limit the ridiculous decor in your home to macaroni art created by your child, skip this magazine.

I found this magazine to be OK but nothing really worth paying for. Flipping through this magazine I felt like they were trying to sell me every baby product under the sun rather than trying to show me how to best bring up my child.
I was surprised to see no mention of breastfeeding in the whole magazine, but I guess there's not a lot of money to be made in breastfeeding products; And the 'must have' baby products would set most new parents back half a years salary. Their information was in many cases common sense and in other cases a bit misleading.
From what I have seen I think this may be the best parenting magazine out there, but I would recommend any new mums to save their cash and use the internet instead, you will find both sides of the story there, not just the one which is trying to make money off you.

This could be a WONDERFUL parenting magazine, if only they didn't leave out the fastest-growing demographic group of moms...those 35 and over! Also, there's too much emphasis on big families, "sibling rivalry", etc. Not much interest to us 43 year old working moms of ONLY children. (My son is two)....

By the way, my husband agrees!

Get with the times, PARENTS!