Sometimes a basketball game stops being about basketball. Recently, a professional women’s basketball game became part of a much larger public disagreement over sex, gender identity, belonging, and women’s sports. The signs, shirts, protests, and public statements received most of the attention, but I think parents have to look beneath the noise. There are children listening. Girls are wondering what it means to be female. And children wrestling with their bodies or gender are hearing adults argue about them in ways that can make them feel more like symbols in a cultural fight than people who need to be known and loved.

There is a real temptation in parenting to want the answer before our child asks the question. I understand that. When your first baby arrives, you suddenly realize there are now three people in the house, and one of them cannot explain anything. The baby cries, and you start running through the list. Hungry? Wet? Tired? Too hot? Too cold? With enough information, maybe I can solve this. Artificial intelligence now offers parents an extraordinary amount of that information almost instantly, and the technology is impressive. But parenting has never been simply an information problem.

One of the deeper problems may be what technology teaches us to expect from relationships. Social media can encourage children to imagine themselves at the center of a personal universe: my feed, my followers, my likes, my photo, my reactions, my preferences. Other people become important partly because of what they do for me. Do they notice me? Affirm me? Respond quickly enough? Include me? Make me feel good? That is not how durable relationships work. Friendship requires a child to eventually move from “Who is paying attention to me?” toward “Who am I paying attention to?”