One of the strange things about raising children is eventually realizing that the people who look so much like us may not actually want to become us. This can be surprising. You spend years looking across the dinner table and seeing your spouse’s smile and maybe, unfortunately, your tendency to leave shoes in the middle of the floor, and, somewhere along the way, you assume there will be other similarities, too. Then one child wants to do exactly what you do, while another looks at your career and thinks, “That seems terrible.” That is not necessarily a parenting problem. It may simply mean we have finally discovered that our children are people.

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.