Something strangely powerful is happening in some classrooms when adults take technology away. Schools that once worked hard to put a device in every student's hands are now experimenting with removing those same devices, and some educators report changes that have little to do with test scores. Kids are talking to each other more, teachers are having meaningful conversations, students are looking up as they move through hallways, and there are reports of stronger community and even greater confidence about life after high school. One word that surfaced in our recent Celebrate Kids Podcast conversation was resilience, and that word caught my attention because resilience is not normally the first thing we associate with putting a phone in a locker. We tend to think of resilience as something forged through tragedy or tremendous hardship, but Dr. Kathy defines it much more broadly as the ability to recover from difficulty, disappointment, loss, fear, shame, failure, or simply not being chosen. If that is true, then the ordinary environments where kids learn how to respond when something becomes difficult matter enormously.

A strange moment happens when people start talking about the cost of raising children. Somebody throws out a number so large it makes you wonder whether every child in America is quietly eating goldfish crackers made from actual gold, and suddenly family life sounds less like a relationship and more like a thirty year financial instrument. The numbers in our recent Celebrate Kids Podcast episode were intentionally sobering: housing is expensive, college is expensive, young adults carry debt, career stability can feel uncertain, and raising children undeniably changes what a family can spend, save, buy, and do. As a father of eight, I also know the difference between a statistic describing the theoretical cost of a child and how real families live. Hand me downs happen, meals scale differently, grandparents help, churches step in, siblings share, friends trade babysitting, and life rarely follows the neat assumptions built into a national estimate.

Most parents begin with more confidence than experience. We read books, watch other families, talk with friends, remember what our own parents did, and piece together a picture of what good parenting should look like. When Nancy and I were having children, What to Expect When You're Expecting seemed to be everywhere, and there was something reassuring about realizing other parents were following many of the same nap schedules and strategies we were. If everybody we trusted was doing roughly the same thing, it felt like we must be getting parenting right. Then the child actually grew, another child arrived who was nothing like the first one, culture changed, new research appeared, and many of the supposedly settled questions became unsettled all over again. That may be why I was interested in the research we discussed recently on the Celebrate Kids Podcast, which shows that many younger parents describe themselves as “cycle breaking” parents and that a large majority of parents say their parenting changes as their children grow. The finding sounds trendy on the surface, but underneath it is a question every generation of parents eventually has to answer: What from the past should I carry forward, and what do I need to change?