The Culture Mom is an editorial magazine for mothers who still have opinions about things. Theater, travel, food, books, design, the exhausting business of raising people. We have been at this since 2010.
How this started
In 2010, Holly Rosen Fink was a New York City mother with two small children, a career behind her in television, and a growing irritation with the way parenting media talked to women. Everything was either a product roundup or a confessional. Nobody was writing about the Sunday matinee she took her daughter to, or the Ethiopian restaurant in Harlem that turned out to be the best meal of the month, or why a museum with a good stroller policy is worth an hour on the subway.
So she started writing it herself. She called it The Culture Mom, which was half a joke and half a thesis: motherhood does not require you to stop being a person with taste.
Holly had spent years at Lifetime, Nickelodeon and MTV before founding Culture Mom Media. Her work has appeared in CBS News, HuffPost, Parade and BroadwayWorld. What began as a blog about New York culture grew into a destination for family travel, arts coverage, and the kind of recommendations that assume you can read a wine list.
By the mid-2010s the site was reviewing Broadway shows, mapping out family itineraries across Europe, and being cited by other parents as the place they went before booking anything. It was one woman with a strong point of view. That worked well, and it had a ceiling.
The 2026 relaunch
In 2026 we rebuilt The Culture Mom as a full editorial magazine with seven category editors, each of whom actually knows her subject. Holly remains Founder and Editor-at-Large, where she belongs, covering theater and New York culture.
The rest of the masthead: Sarah Banks Goldberg runs Travel, a Westchester mother of three who freelanced for Travel + Leisure before joining us. Maya Wright-Ojeda runs Food, an ICE-trained recipe developer who came from NYT Cooking and tests everything out of a Brooklyn kitchen with two kids underfoot. Margot Schiller runs Arts & Culture, a former Nickelodeon producer who has contributed to Common Sense Media and has strong feelings about what is worth two hours of your family’s weekend.
Dr. Renee Halverson runs Parenting. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia and has three children, which means she can tell you what the research says and also what happens when the research meets a Tuesday night. Devon Park-Burton runs Style & Home after eight years at Real Simple. Priya Shetty, RD runs Wellness. She is a registered dietitian specializing in postpartum care and a contributor to Parents Magazine.
You can read their full bios and see everything each of them has written on our editors page. We think you should. Knowing who wrote something is not a small detail.
What we cover
Seven sections, each with an editor whose name is on it.
Travel — Family trips that are actually good, not just survivable. Hotels we have slept in, cities we have navigated with a stroller, the flights and the trains and the logistics nobody warns you about.
Food — Recipes developed and tested in a real kitchen, restaurant recommendations, and honest answers about what a family of four will eat on a weeknight.
Arts & Culture — Theater, museums, books, film and television. What is worth your time and your money, and what your children will genuinely sit through.
Parenting — Evidence-informed, non-hysterical. Sleep, screens, school, siblings, adolescence. Written by someone with clinical training and personal experience of the mess.
Style & Home — Clothes, furniture, organization, and the objects you live with. Fewer things, better chosen.
Wellness — Nutrition, postpartum recovery, mental health and the physical realities of motherhood. Grounded in research, never in wishful thinking.
Reviews — Products we bought, used for at least three weeks, and formed a real opinion about. Sometimes that opinion is that you should not buy it.
Our editorial standard
Every piece has to pass one test before it goes up: would I send this to my sister?
Not to a stranger. Not to a search engine. To someone who knows me, would call me out if the recommendation was bad, and does not have time to read four thousand words of preamble before getting to the answer.
That test kills a lot of drafts. It kills the roundup that lists twelve products because twelve is a good number for search. It kills the recipe nobody made. It kills the travel guide assembled from other travel guides. What survives is the thing you would actually pass along.
How we are different
We test things. Products in our reviews get a minimum of 21 days of real use, and we buy most of them ourselves. If a brand sent it, we say so. Our full editorial policy lays out exactly how this works.
Our editors have names and credentials. No house bylines, no anonymous “staff” attributions, no invented experts. When Priya writes about postpartum nutrition, she is writing as a registered dietitian. When Renee writes about adolescent anxiety, she is writing as a clinical psychologist. You can look them up.
We have opinions and we put them on the record. A ranking means we ranked it. A “best” means we think it is best. We do not hedge every recommendation into uselessness, and we do not pretend that eleven products are all excellent in their own way.
We tell you where the money comes from. Some of our links earn us a commission. That is disclosed on every article that has them and explained in full on our affiliate disclosure page. Commission rates have never determined a ranking and never will.
Who we are writing for
Mothers who want the trip, the meal, the show and the book to be good. Who are not looking for permission to have standards. Who would like the recommendation to come from someone who actually went, cooked it, saw it, or read it.
You are busy. We try to be worth the ten minutes.
How to reach us
Pitches, corrections, partnership questions and general notes all have a home on our contact page. We read everything, and we answer more of it than you would expect.