By the time you get here, you probably already read emails, Slack threads, checked your calendar, read the school notice, maybe something in the pediatrician’s portal, and at least one text or Teams or Gchat that begins with “quick question.”
I have no interest in adding 1,500 words to that pile simply because a machine can produce them quickly.
Working Parent is written, reported, edited and produced by me, Georgia Logothetis. It’s not AI slop. I do use AI. I’ve studied it intensely, even published policy recommendations to lawmakers about it. It would be strange to publish seriously about modern work and pretend the technology does not exist. Like you, I use it in the course of research, production, and coding, much as I use search engines, spreadsheets, databases and other tools that make a one-person publication possible.
There is a line, though, and it matters.
I don’t ask an AI model to write an article that will generate clicks and then paste the result onto this site. I don’t lightly rewrite generated copy and put my name on it. I don’t publish an argument I have not worked through myself.
When I write a policy brief, I read the underlying material. I follow the sources. I try to figure out where the conventional explanation is incomplete and, especially, where a decision made far away eventually lands in somebody’s actual day.
The editorials I write are based entirely on the real life I live from that dawn wake up time until I fold the last load of laundry before bed. My promise to you is that I will never invent a scene because it would make a better opening. I will not manufacture vulnerability because a sad story performs well online. If I do not believe the sentence, I do not want it under my name.
I edit, heavily (I am infamous for my redlining!). Sometimes a draft gets shorter. Sometimes it grows to 5,000 words and I step away for a week and come back with an editor’s hacksaw. Sometimes the entire premise turns out to be weak and I start again. I would rather lose a day’s work than publish something that sounds finished but has nothing underneath it.
Working Parent will never become a content mill. There is no editorial value in publishing six articles about morning routines or because “working parent morning routine” happens to be a useful search term. There is plenty of that material on the internet already.
What I want to know is harder: Why is this taking so much of our time? Who decided it had to work this way? Is the advice everyone repeats actually true? Is there a policy, benefit, piece of research, management decision or overlooked bit of math that changes what we should do next?
Those questions require judgment. That’s why there’s a real human behind Working Parent.
Sources and corrections
Policy reporting is sourced. When I use research, legislation, government data or someone else’s reporting, you should be able to find where the factual claim came from. When the evidence is unsettled, I will not make it sound settled. When I am giving you my analysis, I will not disguise it as a fact.
I will also inevitably get something wrong eventually. Every publication does. If you see something, as they say, say something. Send it to me, call me out. Material factual errors will be corrected, and substantive corrections will be noted on the piece. Typos will be quietly corrected with a heavy sigh and a grumble under my breath (writers, if you know, you know).
Independence
Working Parent is independent. No one paid me to set up shop in this little corner of the internet. There is one final standard I use when I look at a finished piece.
You are giving me part of a lunch hour, ten minutes after the kids go to bed, or the small stretch of quiet before somebody needs you again.
I should have done enough work to deserve it.
Georgia Logothetis
Founder & Editor