Romper

Letter From The Editors

No one has been sugarcoating the experience of parenting lately. And for good reason. Americans don’t get paid family leave; childcare is unaffordable and in short supply; housing costs are ballooning; women are still somehow doing the majority of domestic labor. It’s enough to make you think that maybe parenting is for chumps who don’t like sleep or free time or money.

And maybe that’s fair, but we want to make sure you know there’s more to it than that. We’re not here to convince anyone that procreating is the only, or even the best route, to happiness and fulfillment — it’s certainly not the only way to build a family. But as your fellow chumps-in-arms, we’d like to say a few words in its defense.

As Evie Ebert puts it in her essay for this issue, “The planet lit up in Technicolor once my baby was here breathing its oxygen. I laughed out loud at 6 a.m. for the first time in my life. One day I took 50 photos of his feet.” In this year’s New Parents Issue, we want to offer a bit of hard-won advice and commiseration. But mostly we want to celebrate how far you’ve come and welcome you to the other side. There is so much joy ahead.

—Romper Editors