There are countless unemployed, underemployed, and reasonably employed adults who ostensibly have plenty of bandwidth for responsible parenting. Two parents wo

There are countless unemployed, underemployed, and reasonably employed adults who ostensibly have plenty of bandwidth for responsible parenting. Two parents working four jobs between them is a tragedy of its own, that needs to be addressed, but it’s not the norm by any means. There aren’t even enough jobs for that. What actually seems to missing for parents is insight into how to find wellness within what they have. Traditions that allowed for finding joy and contentment in modest lives with some discomfort have been supplanted by a fantasy that we should all have all the cool toys and do all the fun travel and never feel sad and that if we’re not receiving that life we should either feel ashamed or take a pill. People are buying melatonin for their sleepless kids because they take pills for their own sleepless nights, and they have sleepless nights themselves because many of their parents forgot to teach them that it’s important to just chill the fuck out and quietly unwind without a lot of stimulation as evening comes on. We do need social effort to rectify all this, but it starts with re-teaching people how to find ease and acceptance in their inevitably modest lives, an education that most can start to find by just looking backwards a few generations in their own family. Those lives didn’t embody aristocratic fantasies either, and included plenty of discomfort, but you don’t find the anxiety and chronic misery people feel crushed by now, nor the troubling and incorrect idea that all discomfort must have an easy remedy in the form of a pill or whatever.