Editor in chief
Wren Halligan
Wren Halligan founded The Cradle Press after fifteen years editing for a family quarterly. She has two children and the kind of small house most readers will recognize.
Beats
Published in The Cradle Press
Generations
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.
Schools & Learning
The Reading Specialist's Office at a Rural Idaho Elementary
At Valley View Elementary in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, the reading specialist's office is a converted storage closet at the end of the second-grade hallway. A teacher named Eleanor Halstead has been working in it for nine years.
Family Rituals
The Birthday Letter, Eleven Years In
Every year on her daughter's birthday a Halifax mother writes a letter she will not send until the child is eighteen.
Outdoor Childhood
A Creek Three Blocks From Home
For nineteen months, a family in Decatur, Georgia let their two children, ages seven and nine, walk to a small urban creek alone, and kept a small notebook of what they brought back.
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.
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.
Outdoor Childhood
How Kids Climb Trees: An Observed Account
Across two weekends at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, an editor watched twenty-three children between four and twelve climb the same large white oak, and tried to write down what she saw.
Books for Kids
The Picture Books We Keep When We Cull
On the small ceremony of clearing a child's bookshelf at age seven, and the eleven books that stayed.
Sleep
Ten Strategies That Did Not Work
Wren Halligan keeps a list of the sleep interventions she tried with her second child, who did not go down for fourteen consecutive months, and what each one taught her.
Generations
The Cousin We Never Met, Found at Thirty-One
In March 2025, Daniel Houk opened an AncestryDNA result and saw a match labeled first cousin. He had no first cousins. He was, he had been told his whole life, the only grandchild on his mother's side.
Early Years
The Slow Days of a Nine-Month-Old
Felix Marin-Brennan, nine months and four days, has decided that the most interesting object in the world is a wooden spoon. His mother, on the floor beside him, is trying to think of what to make for dinner.
Schools & Learning
Homeschooling Two Siblings on a Wisconsin Dairy Road
On a stretch of County Road P outside Viroqua, Wisconsin, a former civil engineer named Sarah Holst-Larsen has been homeschooling her two sons for four years. Their school day begins at 9:00 and ends, on most days, by 1:00.
Food
The Family Friday Pizza, Across Years
For eleven years, the Halligan family of Portland, Maine has eaten pizza on Friday night. Wren Halligan writes about how the ritual changed as her children grew.
Early Years
The Second Week Home: Rocking a Newborn at 3 a.m.
Anya Brooks-Vance came home from Maine Medical Center on a Tuesday in late April. By the second week, her parents had stopped counting the hours and started counting the songs.
Books for Kids
What Survives a Hundred Readings: A List of Seven
Seven picture books that lasted the long stretch of a child's nightly attention, drawn from one family's shelf in Portland, Maine.
Family Rituals
The Friday Pizza That Became the Week
Ten years of Friday-night pizzas in a small Portland kitchen, and what the ritual quietly held together.
Generations
Grandparents at a Distance: The Video Call as a Second Living Room
Eleanor Brennan is seventy-three and lives in Galway. Her grandson Theo is four and lives in Portland, Maine. They see each other, on a screen propped against a fruit bowl, every Tuesday and Saturday morning.