Editor’s Note: To read more Moms We Love profiles, click HERE!
When Farah Miller, the Huffington Post’s executive Family and Relationships editor and mom-of-two, was hired to launch HuffPost Parents, she faced the challenge of developing an entirely new model for a vertical within a news-focused site.
“It was completely terrifying because they basically had a structure for how to launch a vertical here, and that was built off of how Politics was run, or how Green was run, and those were our news sites,” Miller says. “What I wanted was to feature parents’ voices.”
Four years later, with eye-catching headlines like “7 Things Good Mothers Do That I’m Not Going To Do Anymore,” or “32 Priceless Photos Of Kids Meeting Their Siblings For The First Time,” more than 750,000 Facebook fans, and ranking consistently as one of the top verticals for mobile visits, HuffPost Parents’ mix of personal blog posts, viral videos, and coverage of important issues such as breastfeeding and adoption have made it a leading voice in the world of parenting media.
“We wanted to focus on the lighter side of parenting,” Miller, who also oversees five additional HuffPost verticals, explains. “And then also raise issues that we think need more visibility.”
The playful sensibility that has been a key component of HuffPost Parents’ success reflects much of what Miller herself loves about being a mom to two daughters, Zadie, 5, and Bergen, 4 months (named after the Brooklyn street that Miller’s family called home before their recent move to Westchester).
“The biggest joy [of parenting] for me…is just how much fun and how funny kids can be,” she says. “The things that come out of Zadie’s mouth are absolutely hilarious, but have been since the day she started talking. Even the baby—the way [her] arms fly around in sort of a funny way, or the expression she makes just because she’s kind of learning how to use her face—they’re really hilarious.”
Miller joined the Huffington Post in 2011, shortly after AOL had acquired the site and began to incorporate more lifestyle coverage. With previous editorial stints at the women’s lifestyle site iVillage.com, and in marketing for Knopf and at Oprah.com, Miller had ample online writing and editing experience, but had never covered parenting before. However, as the mother of a then-18-month old daughter, she certainly had some first-hand experience with the topic.
“For a while it was slow going,” she recalls. “People would ask what I did, and I’d be like: ‘Oh I work at the Huffington Post.’ And then they’d ask what section and I’d say Parenting, and they’d be like: ‘But that’s a politics site.’”
Miller worked to move away from parenting news coverage, and began developing a stable of top parenting bloggers who could be regular contributors to the site. Then, in early 2012, the site published blogger and author Glennon Melton’s post titled “Don’t Carpe Diem”—which rejected the notion that absolutely every moment of your kids’ childhood must be savored—and it went viral, garnering more than 127,000 shares on Facebook.
“I think that’s when we really started from hearing from people,” Miller says. “At one point, we were driving more traffic in visits than Politics.” Now, she faces the challenge of sorting through the abundance of quality submissions that she receives daily.
As the site continues to evolve, Miller remains committed to featuring an array of perspectives, and is especially conscious of including dads in the conversation. “That’s why we were HuffPost Parents and not HuffPost Moms from the beginning, both because I think it’s important for dads to be heard, but also I think that helps moms,” she says.
The site’s role as a virtual community and space for parents to vent is one that Miller takes seriously. “We want parents to feel like they’re not alone in feeling like things are hard, even if they seem like things you shouldn’t be complaining about, so that runs the gamut,” she explains. “Dealing with special needs, dealing with a child who you’ve lost, or a divorce, or poverty—there’s some really hard stuff that we want to cover, but we also want to be clear that having a toddler who’s acting like an asshole is hard in its own right, and we are a community around that.”
To learn more about HuffPost Parents, visit huffingtonpost.com/parents.
