The Top Parent Magazines That Are Read By More Parents

Whether you're a newlywed couple, anticipating your baby, first-time parents or a growing family, there are a whole slew of magazines being published to help you along on your life's journey with your children. While the choices facing you on the magazine rack or online might seem confusing, it would be best to use simple logic for selecting the top parent magazines for every life stage you're going through together.

In other words, the top parent magazines are read by more parents. And the time-tested way to measure higher readership is through audited circulation. Most websites for selling, reviewing or recommending these magazines list the titles according to certain criteria with several of these sites ranking the magazines based on the publications' audited circulation. As parents looking for which titles to subscribe to or to buy on the newsstand, the audited figures would be your best guide to making your choice.

According to one such website, the top parent magazines are Babytalk First Months (circulation: 3.384 million), American Baby's First Year of Life (3.04 million), New Parent (2.756 million), Parents (2.214 million), Disney Family Fun (2.198 million), Babytalk (2.003 million), American Baby (2.002 million), Parenting Early Years (1.65 million), Scholastic Parent & Child (1.313 million), and Babytalk Pregnancy Planner Guide (1.2 million).

Such a listing would be a good indicator of what most parents who are in the same situation as you are reading. Parent magazine listings of other websites appear to use qualitative criteria, editorial bias or some commercial considerations for why certain titles, despite being of lower circulation or lesser known, are included and why other titles with higher validated circulation are not listed at all.

For example, one site lists the magazines Working Mother (circulation: 827,000), Pregnancy & Newborn (229,000), and Pregnancy (131,900) but does not list some of the higher circulated titles previously mentioned. There's even a discrepancy as this site ranks the magazine Parenting Early Years with a higher circulation (2.185 million) compared to the 1.65 million circulation cited by the previous website referred to in this article. Perhaps the higher number is an unaudited figure and is the publisher's stated print run.

Another site recommends a combination of the top parent magazines and perhaps less popular titles such as Fit Pregnancy, Hybrid Mom, Kiwi, Parenting School Years as well as the aforementioned Pregnancy & Newborn. No audited circulation figures were included in the list.

It may seem paradoxical that while there's a much-quoted statistic that fifty percent of marriages in the U.S. unfortunately end up in divorce, the total U.S. population reached the 300 million mark just a few years ago. Whether it's children born out of wedlock or children sired while the couples were (briefly) married, the common denominator apparently is that we love our children. Viewing it from this perspective may explain why the majority of the top parent magazines are for babies and first-time parents. Nobody can seem to resist the coming and the subsequent presence of a new-born child while new moms and dads are all over themselves trying to get it right the first time and each succeeding time as well by perusing their preferred magazines.

Look at the title of the top-ranked magazine. Babytalk First Months with almost 3,400,000 copies circulating per issue (outranking the original title, Babytalk, which only sells over 2 million copies). The second-ranked is American Baby's First Year of Life, over 3 million copies in circulation each issue. (For a spin-off magazine title, that's even higher than its original sibling, American Baby, which only has 2 million copies circulating per issue.)

Check out some of the other titles in the list of the top parent magazines. Number three in the circulation ranking is New Parent, with 2,756,000 copies, outselling the more established title, Parents, which comes in at number four with over 2,200,000 copies per issue. These magazines may seem to overlap each other but, in reality, they are finely segmented as validated by the publishing success of the aforesaid spin-off titles. Even the fifth ranked magazine, Disney Family Fun, with close to 2.2 million copies specifically targets families with children in the 3 to 12 age range.

It would be interesting to see what the top parent magazines would be in another generation or so. With our longer life spans, will the U.S. consist of a graying population by then (like what Japan is experiencing today)? Or will Americans continue to bear more children? Perhaps the question we should really ask is, will magazines as we know them today continue to exist at all thirty years from now?

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The Top Parent Magazines That Are Read By More Parents

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