Sleep
Night Waking at Four: An Anatomy
Many parents are told that night waking ends with infancy. It often does not. Wren Halligan on the children who keep waking past their fourth birthday, and the families who learn to live with it.
The Cradle Press
Slow notes on raising children in a fast country.
generations · This week's feature
The Step-Grandmother and the Blended Family History
On the wall of the Saunders-Mott family kitchen in Burlington, Vermont, there are seventeen framed photographs. The newest, from June 2025, shows a Christmas dinner with twenty-three people in it. The family has been counting itself, with some difficulty, since 2009.
From the kitchen
All recipes →
Outdoor Childhood
A Week With No Schedule in Late June
After a school year of camps, classes, and color-coded calendars, one family in Bloomington, Indiana tried a week in late June with nothing on it, and discovered how slowly children fill an empty day.
Books for Kids
The Wordless Picture Book and an Eighteen-Month-Old
Family Rituals
The After-School Snack as a Ritual
Sleep
The First Night the Baby Monitor Came Off
Food
Eating Out With Small Children: A Field Report
Early Years
The First Daycare Drop-Off
Generations
What Grandfather Taught Without Saying So
Schools & Learning
The Reading Specialist's Office at a Rural Idaho Elementary
Outdoor Childhood
Winter Outside With a Three-Year-Old
Books for Kids
Reading a Long Chapter Book Across a Sick Week
Family Rituals
The Birthday Letter, Eleven Years In
Browse
Table of contents
No. 01
Early Years
The first three years, day by day.
No. 02
Schools & Learning
How children learn, and the places they learn in.
No. 03
Family Rituals
The small repeated acts that make a family.
No. 04
Books for Kids
Children's books, read carefully.
No. 05
Outdoor Childhood
Time outside, in cities and in country.
No. 06
Sleep
What children need and what families do.
No. 07
Food
Feeding small humans, day by day.
No. 08
Generations
Grandparents, cousins, and the wider family.
"Slow notes on raising children in a fast country."
— Wren Halligan · Editor in chief
Notes from the back of the cupboard
Early Years
Introducing the Older Sibling to the Baby
When Niall Donnelly-Eaton was born at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on a Saturday morning in May, his sister Mairead, three and a half, was at home with her grandmother. The introduction, two days later, did not go as planned.
Food
The Family Breakfast, Across School Years
Wren Halligan returns to the table for a series on what families actually eat at 7 a.m., from kindergarten through middle school.
Generations
The Grandmother Who Moved In
Vidya Iyer arrived in San Jose from Chennai on a humid Tuesday in September 2024 and has not been back. She is seventy-one. She lives in what was once her daughter's home office. She does not, on most days, regret the decision.
Sleep
A Week in a Bedtime Routine
Marisol Fuentes spent seven evenings observing the bedtime routine of an Austin family with three children, ages eight, five, and two. The choreography is precise.
Outdoor Childhood
Mud as a Curriculum
At a small parent cooperative in Asheville, North Carolina, the only required outdoor element is a twelve-foot circle of unmown ground that is allowed to get muddy and stay that way.
Books for Kids
The Bilingual Picture Book in a Spanish-English Household
What three years of reading in two languages did, and did not do, for one four-year-old in San Antonio.
Family Rituals
Saying Grace Without Religion
A secular family in Edinburgh invented a small phrase to say before dinner and has been saying it for almost a decade.
Masthead
Cooks & contributors
The Sunday note
A short letter every Sunday morning.
One piece we published, one we read elsewhere. No ads, no tracking.