About Eltern

Eltern

Eltern is Germany's oldest and best-known parenting magazine, founded in 1966 and published monthly from Hamburg. Produced by a dedicated family editorial team that also runs the parenting website urbia.de, it covers nearly every topic of interest to parents — from the desire for children and pregnancy through the upbringing and development of babies and toddlers, childcare, everyday family life, health, nutrition and partnership issues to the father's role and child-friendly holidays. In February 2023 the publisher announced that the printed edition would be discontinued by 2025 as part of a large-scale restructuring, with only the digital offering to be maintained. In March 2025 the brand Eltern was sold, together with Brigitte and Gala, from RTL Deutschland to the Funke Mediengruppe, which continues the brand digitally.

Overview

For six decades, Eltern has been the reference publication for German parents — a magazine that combined practical advice with serious journalism about childhood and family life. In the 1960s and 1970s, when it was widely read, it played a special role in the public debate about new parenting styles and pedagogy: sex education and the Kinderläden (alternative parent-run nurseries) were covered as attentively as anti-authoritarian education or the smack — then still a legal parenting tool, now banned — as a means of discipline. That willingness to take parents seriously as an audience for ideas, not just tips, defined the magazine's identity from the start.

History

Eltern was founded in 1966 in Hamburg, appearing in the Gruner + Jahr publishing house — the publishing giant created a year earlier from the merger of the John Jahr, Gerd Bucerius and Richard Gruner companies, which went on to become Europe's largest magazine publisher. The founding editor Otto Schuster led the magazine through its formative years, when West Germany was renegotiating almost everything about authority, including the authority of parents over children.

The magazine grew with the generations it served. As the children of the 1968 generation became parents themselves in the 1980s and 1990s, Eltern remained their companion through pregnancy, infancy and the school years, expanding its coverage as family models diversified. In 1996 it gained a sister publication, Eltern for Family — renamed Eltern family in 2006 — a monthly family magazine for parents with children aged 5 to 15, built around "reports from parents for parents" rather than pure parenting advice, with a measured reach of 0.34 million readers in 2017. Eltern family ran until June 2023, when its last issue appeared — a quieter casualty of the same restructuring that ended Eltern's print run.

The publisher's own history shaped the magazine's fate. Gruner + Jahr had been majority-owned by Bertelsmann since the mid-1970s; in January 2022 Bertelsmann sold G+J to its subsidiary RTL Deutschland for 230 million euros, folding the publisher into the RTL group. The new owner moved quickly to shrink the print portfolio: in February 2023 RTL announced that Eltern's printed edition would be discontinued by 2025, with only the digital offering maintained — a decision that affected a magazine whose last reported sold circulation was 49,253 copies in the first quarter of 2023.

In March 2025 came the final break: RTL Deutschland sold the brands Brigitte, Gala and Eltern — the last of Gruner + Jahr's great magazine titles — to the Funke Mediengruppe. Around 300 employees of the three brands moved to Funke with their existing employment contracts, in a deal the Essen-based publisher framed not as a wind-down but as an investment in journalism's future. Funke, which had already acquired Axel Springer's women's and TV-guide titles (including Bild der Frau, Hörzu and TV Digital) in 2013, folded the three new brands into its portfolio of women's and lifestyle magazines. For Eltern, the sale closed a circle of sorts: a magazine founded to accompany parents through social change now had to navigate the most disruptive change in its own industry's history — the end of print — under a new owner betting that strong brands can survive the medium's transformation.

Content and concept

Eltern covers the full arc of family life. The thematic range runs from the desire to have children and pregnancy through birth, breastfeeding, baby and toddler development, sleep, nutrition and health, to childcare options, the compatibility of family and career, partnership problems, the evolving role of fathers, single parenting, puberty, and child-friendly holiday destinations. The magazine's approach combines expert knowledge — paediatricians, psychologists, educators — with the lived experience of parents, and its tone has always aimed at taking its readers' intelligence seriously rather than preaching at them.

The family editorial team (Familienredaktion) that produces Eltern also runs urbia.de, one of Germany's largest parenting websites and communities, giving the brand a digital reach far beyond the printed page. Marie-Luise Lewicki — editor-in-chief of Eltern for 16 years — became publisher (Herausgeberin) of the title at the end of 2017; the family editorial team is led by Bernd Hellermann, Rosa Wetscher and Franziska Klingspor.

Coverage and audience

Eltern's audience has always been parents who want more than instruction manuals: the magazine's 1960s and 1970s coverage of sex education, anti-authoritarian kindergartens and new pedagogical thinking addressed parents as participants in a societal debate, not just as consumers of advice. That tradition continued through later decades as the magazine tackled working mothers, patchwork families, and fathers' changing roles.

The print magazine's circulation declined with the broader German magazine market — the last reported figure, 49,253 sold copies in early 2023, was a shadow of its heyday — but the brand's digital audience on eltern.de and urbia.de reaches millions of parents monthly, making the digital-first strategy under Funke a plausible future for a 60-year-old brand.

Ownership

Eltern is now owned by the Funke Mediengruppe, the Essen-based media group that acquired the brand from RTL Deutschland in March 2025 together with Brigitte and Gala. Funke is one of Germany's largest regional media companies, with newspapers, magazines, radio stations and digital portals across the country; the acquisition of the three former Gruner + Jahr flagship brands significantly strengthened its position in the women's and family magazine segment. The brand's previous owner, Gruner + Jahr — founded 1965, long Europe's largest magazine publisher — effectively ceased to exist as an independent publisher with the sale, ending a chapter of German media history.

Digital presence

With the printed edition discontinued, eltern.de and urbia.de are now the brand's home. The websites carry the magazine's editorial tradition into the digital present: expert-written guides on pregnancy, birth and child development, community forums where parents exchange experiences, and service content on everything from children's health to family travel. The transition from a monthly magazine to a continuously updated digital brand mirrors the transformation of the entire German parenting media landscape — from the printed authority of 1966 to the searchable, always-available companion of today.

Sixty years after its founding, Eltern remains what it has always been: the place German parents turn when they want to understand their children — and themselves — a little better. The medium has changed; the mission has not. Under Funke's ownership, the brand's future is digital-first — eltern.de and the urbia.de community carrying forward a conversation that began in print in 1966, when a Hamburg magazine first dared to treat parents as thinking adults. The brand's sixty-year archive of parenting journalism gives its digital platforms a depth of expert content that few competitors can match.