There is a heartbreaking sentence many teens are saying out loud right now: “Not every home is safe.” Those words are heavy because they do not always mean what adults first assume. Sometimes they mean danger or abuse, and we should never minimize that. But sometimes they mean something quieter and easier to miss: I don’t feel seen here. I don’t know if my voice matters here.

It usually happens in the moments when parenting feels like a public performance. You are in the grocery store, the cart is half full, one child is hungry, another is bored, and the baby is seconds away from becoming the soundtrack for aisle seven. Or you are on an airplane, trapped between strangers, praying your toddler does not discover the full volume of their lungs. So you reach for the screen, not because you are lazy or careless, but because you need five minutes of peace.

Some childhood memories smell like pencil shavings, school hallways, and pepperoni pizza. For many parents who grew up in the 80s and 90s, Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! program was more than a reading challenge. It was a tiny paper certificate that felt like treasure. It was the thrill of reading one more chapter because a personal pan pizza was waiting on the other side.