I can’t think of anything harder than parenting today. I don’t have children of my own, but I clearly see the challenges in raising them today.

It must feel like like trying to raise a human in a house with no walls and a thousand open windows. Your kids hear every voice and are exposed to every fear.

In the past parents could shield their kids from the worst of the world. No longer. There’s no longer that clear boundary between the world children kids live in and the one parents hope to shield them from.

News is inescapable.  So are cruelty, comparison, catastrophe. None of it waits until they are old enough to understand. It’s all right there in front them. And I don’t envy parents today, who must figure out how much to explain, how much to protect, and how much to let go.

That kind of vigilance must be exhausting.

Screens were sold to us with the promise of connection but instead, for many kids they deliver only pressure,  as we’ve seen from kids who felt so inadequate in comparison to others they’ve have gone so far as to take their own lives. Imagine your kid succumbing to pressure coming from behind a screen. It’s heartbreaking. In an encouraging move, some countries and now some of our states have banned or are considering bans on social media for kids under the mid-teens.

That sounds wise to me. But not really enogh.

The social worlds kids inhabit every day are open day and night. Our culture monetizes insecurity and then asks why children are anxious. Hell, WE are anxious!

Parents are asked to monitor, limit, encourage, affirm, discipline, and stay endlessly calm, while being told that one wrong move could scar a child for life. Stakes are high and the margin for error feels very small.

Not to mention the loneliness.

Extended families are scattered across the globe so connections are harder. Communities are thinner, too, so it’s harder to connect with them.  Everyone is watching, judging, offering certainty from the cheap seats and it’s relentless. Parents are expected to be experts in psychology, technology, nutrition, education, and trauma—often without support, and usually while carrying their own unresolved trauma.

That’s parenting today.

And yet, amid all of this, parents keep showing up. They try again after getting it wrong. Because no one is perfect: everyone gets it wrong at one point or another.

Parenting today is not about perfection. The truth is, it’s about endurance: sticking out the hard times.  It’s about having enough humility to recognize you don’t know it all. It’s about being present in an age designed to fracture attention and erode patience.

I admire the parents of today so much. The challenge is real—but so is the quiet, daily courage it takes to keep choosing to step up to such a big, important role in a world that makes it so hard.

Kudos to them.