Throughout her life, my husband and I closely followed pediatricians’ advice around screens. Starting around age 6, we allowed our daughter Rosy to watch Netflix or YouTube for about an hour each day. We rarely let her viewing go beyond two hours, as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has long advised.

Several years later, I found that I was struggling harder and harder to pull her away from devices. She would beg for screen time all day. When the timer went off, our thoughtful and helpful daughter suddenly began acting like a rude toddler. She yelled and fought with me. Sometimes, she would run around the house at 9 p.m., crying or begging for “one more episode.” One night, she curled up into the fetal position and hid under her desk, whimpering. I had to coax her out by rubbing her back gently and talking to her in a whisper.

This is so ridiculous, I thought. Why do we go through this horrible ritual every single night? So two years ago, I made a resolution: For the entire summer, our family would go screen-free.

No iPad for Rosy. No social media for me. No video games for my husband. No streaming platforms for any of us. We could text and call friends as much as we wanted, but outside of work, we would use no screens.

I initially worried we would fail miserably–or that we would succeed yet feel miserable. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. After a week, my daughter started to do things that I never expected. In the afternoons, she played outside voluntarily until dinner. One morning, I walked into her room and found her still in her pajamas, reading a book—and wanting to keep reading.

Getting rid of the screens wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, it was fun. Why? Because I had the tools and strategies to impose the policy successfully and overcome the pull of products intentionally engineered to addict children and captivate them for as long as possible. And you can too.

Let me explain.

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I’ve been surprised to see that even after the pandemic ended, this behavior persisted. A child gets too close to another kid with a runny nose or a cough and a parent pulls him back. “Don’t touch.” “Don’t share.” “Don’t get sick.” One of my children’s friends canceled a playdate because he had been sick the week before.

Childhood is supposed to involve contact with the world itself. The immune system appears to benefit from ordinary contact with a world that has not been sanitized flat: soil, animals, other children, and early exposure to foods. The clearest example is peanuts: Early introduction lowers the risk of peanut allergy. The same pattern holds for pet exposure. Early-life contact with dogs and cats appears to reduce the risk of allergies, asthma, and food sensitivities.

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If I had to define the parenting style of my father, Ben Sasse, in one sentence, it would be those seven words. I can’t pinpoint the first time I remember him using them, but over the years, I’ve been directed by the prompt many times. After any success or failure, whether jumping with excitement or drenched in tears, my dad asked us to recite three things: one that reaffirmed our relationship with God; one that reaffirmed our family’s unconditional love for us; and one that reaffirmed qualities we most valued, like perseverance and grit.

The specific statements changed, but the goal behind the formula was consistent: Get out of your messy head and take an aerial view of your life.

In December, two hours before I walked the stage at my college graduation, we learned that my dad had been diagnosed with metastasized, stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The following weeks were a blur of extraordinary grief and random crying—in parking lots, on morning runs, in Trader Joe’s checkout lines, and while studying for the MCAT. I’m not sure what the world record is for use of the word terminal in a 30-minute appointment, but I’m pretty confident that between Memorial Sloan Kettering and MD Anderson Cancer Center, at least one renowned oncologist we saw came close.

In the months since (which is more time than early conversations and scans predicted), I’ve watched my dad navigate this new world with grit, humor, resilience . . . and frequent puking in the front yard. But most importantly, I’ve watched him pull out the best weapon for any battle: a rooted worldview grounded in theology.

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Friday was a day I’ve dreaded for over a decade. At around 6:20 a.m., we got my oldest son, Judson, up, gave him a bath, put his safety harness on (don’t worry, we dressed him first), and then watched him amble down our driveway to the school bus, as we had almost every school day since fourth grade. He went through whatever class activities he had, came to the end of the day, and got ready to ride the bus home, as he had almost every school day since fourth grade. His teachers and aides wiped their eyes, put him on the bus, and off he went, just the same as he’d done almost every school day since fourth grade.

Judson was a senior in high school. He also has profound autism. He’s 18 years old, and while he blessedly has some capacity for speech, I’ve never had what you would call a conversation with him. And I assume (though I can’t really know) that he had no clue that Friday wasn’t just any old school day like he’s had since fourth grade. Two days ago, Judson Hancock Trende had his last day of class. He got off that bus, and he’ll never get back on. When his schedule-obsessed brain prompts him to seek reassurance by asking “School tomorrow?” today, the same way he has every Sunday for well over a decade, we will have to figure out a way to let him know that, no, there’s no school tomorrow, and not the next day or the next one. Not ever.

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The biggest event in the history of women—bigger, even, than suffrage—was the invention of the birth control pill, which became available in the United States in 1960. For the first time, women had the ability to decide if, when, and how many children they were going to have. When that was combined with the first stirrings of modern feminism, women were finally able to do what men had been doing through the ages: break into factions and tear each other apart. The Mommy Wars will bury us all.

The Mommy Wars were originally a project of the 1980s and centered on a question still at the heart of the current iteration: If a woman can afford to stay home with her children, should she do it? At this point, about 70 percent of American mothers either work or are looking for work, many of them because they cannot afford not to, which would seem to make the question moot. Even Working Mother magazine (est. 1979) threw in the towel a few years ago, because how many things can a career woman do with a rotisserie chicken? Over the past two decades, however, a much more consequential division between young women has quietly and then loudly emerged: the one between mothers and women who are “childfree by choice,” as they often put it.

I know many such women, and you probably do too. If so, you can attest that they don’t seem torn up by the decision. In fact, they made it in exactly the way men beg women to make decisions: logically and on the merits. They know that having a baby would unmoor them from many things they cherish about their lives: the freedom to do whatever they want, untethered by round-the-clock responsibility. They have hopes and dreams about their futures, and they want their earnings to go toward fulfilling them, not toward parenthood. Most of all, they know that babies are a lot of work and that women do most of it. They want to sleep on their own schedules, not on baby time.

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In all my daydreaming about my soon-to-arrive baby, I had hardly thought past the infant stage. But now this wild realization began to bloom in my mind: Babies grow up. And this one, this baby right here that was not yet born—he, too, would grow up and become an adult. And then what? Would we go out for lunch? Would he turn out just like me, someone who loved reading and traveling and making things? Would we be close?

As my co-worker continued describing the outing with her son and their warm relationship and shared love for fancy foods, a definitive thought rose from the depths of my still vague image of motherhood: That’s what I want.

I eventually had two kids, and they both did, in fact, grow up. Now, as I listen to the intense discourse about why people aren’t having children, the expense of day care, the exhaustion and sacrifices of the baby years, I think the conversation is missing the larger point. Most things worth doing are hard, and those years don’t last. Parenting keeps going for years and years after the last diaper change; it is truly the longest of games, but the rewards are ever increasing, and totally exquisite.

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Does it help if I tell you he turns 8 in a few days?

What if I tell you that we live in a nice neighborhood in downtown Colorado Springs where everyone knows one another?

I’m not fond of most parenting trends, but I do like free-range parenting; it makes intuitive sense to me that we are raising kids for adulthood, not childhood, and so we need to let them do things on their own. A 2023 nationally representative survey found that three in four parents of a child 5 to 8 years old say they make it a point to have their child do things themselves. Worry about the child’s safety, the same survey found, is the number one reason kids don’t do things independently.

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Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But honestly, I hate playing imaginary games with my children. For a long time, I thought this was a sure sign that I must be a bad mom. But I love having children. I love having them around. I love cuddling them to sleep at night. I love telling them stories.

It’s just that I would rather do almost anything—vacuum, cook, write, fold laundry, or even pay my taxes—than play princesses and dragons.

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Over the past three decades, the act of raising children to adulthood—the oldest work in the world—has transformed. The amount of time parents spend with kids went vertical in the late 1990s, and there has been no relief since—so much so that a 2023 survey by the American Psychological Association found that 41 percent of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function. That’s about twice the percentage of adults without children.

Theories abound as to why. These range from plummeting birth rates (fewer kids to soak up all that adult attention) to greater economic uncertainty (parents are more likely to adopt intensive styles when the stakes of success are so high) to increased fears for children’s physical safety (a 2025 Harris poll found that an astounding 50 percent of parents thought that two 10-year-olds playing alone in a park were likely to be kidnapped).

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So watching kids today—and as the Gen-Z mom of a 10-month-old baby—I feel something like grief. I know how bad it is for me, so it will be worse for them. They’ll never remember learning to operate a touchscreen; they scroll before they speak. When they grow up, their idea of friendship will be a string of emojis and TikTok dances. It’s not their fault. We gave them this world.

But now, a growing number of parents, teachers, and even former tech executives are trying to turn back the clock. The new trend in children’s toys is not more innovation, but less. Simpler, slower, nostalgic—analog.

This revival isn’t just happening in niche corners of parenting subcultures, like MAHA moms on crunchy parenting forums, or screen time–shaming Boomer blogs. It’s emerging from the very heart of Silicon Valley and expanding into a full-blown product ecosystem.

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This superior method of education was well-known historically, and its effects are still seen in education research today: one-on-one tutoring.

Tutoring dramatically improves a student’s abilities and scores. This improvement is sometimes called “Bloom’s 2 sigma problem,” because in the 1980s the education researcher Benjamin Bloom found that tutored students “performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods.” In other words, “the average tutored student was above 98 percent of the students in the control class.”

Despite its effectiveness, tutoring is nowadays usually reserved for specific tests; the Advanced Placement tests, the SATs, and the GREs form the lucrative trinity of private tutoring. Outside of these, tutoring is mostly used as a corrective to learning gaps or losses—not the main method of actual education.

But if we go back in time, tutoring often did act as the main method of education—at least for the elite. 

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Although the parents have lost in the lower courts, the Supreme Court’s current 6–3 conservative majority gives them hope that this time, the outcome will be different.

“We are eager for the Court to recognize that parents are the primary teachers of their children and that schools must work with us, not against us,” said Billy Moges, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

“We are hopeful that the Court will let kids be kids and let parents guide their religious futures,” said Grace Morrison, another plaintiff.

For more than a decade, of course, parents across the country have fought, both in court and in the political arena, with school districts as they’ve tried to ensure that their religious beliefs are not violated in the classroom. But this is the first time such a case has reached the Supreme Court. The stakes are high: A victory will enable parents—not just in Montgomery County but across the country—to engage with their local public schools without their religious traditions and beliefs being violated.

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In response, we heard from Naomi Schaefer Riley, a writer and scholar who advocates for our society’s most vulnerable children. She has another story to tell, a story about the hundreds of thousands of children in this country whose parents put their lives in danger each year, and who desperately need more government intervention, not less. —The Editors

Last fall, Brittany Patterson was arrested for child endangerment because her 10-year-old son, Soren, was spotted walking alone on a road a mile from their house. The case sparked outrage over government overreach. As a Free Press story put it, “Increasingly, parents all over the country are being punished for giving their kids a bit of leash.”

Such incidents provoke justifiable outrage and calls for reform. These stories, however, are rare, isolated incidents that grab headlines—but are true outliers compared to the reality of children’s welfare in America. Unfortunately, these accounts also fuel the misconception—held by people on both sides of the political aisle—that child protective services are inherently and unnecessarily punitive.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Far fewer people have heard the story of Gavin Peterson, the 12-year-old Utah boy who died last July 9 after being tortured and starved by his father, his father’s girlfriend, and his older brother. Ten years prior, Gavin went to live with his father and father’s girlfriend after he was found as a toddler wandering outside alone and his mother pleaded guilty to exposing her children to illegal drugs.

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But that’s not what happened. Instead, the book catalyzed a movement around the world. Most spec…

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The trial was an international sensation—supporters gathered in a pub in Woodward’s home village to watch the televised sentencing. The case underscored class divisions as well as a simmering anti-feminist backlash: See what happens when mothers don’t stay home with their babies?

Woodward’s defense was led by attorney Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, who was fresh off O.J. Simpson’s “dream team.” He put the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome itself on trial. “I literally went back and read every paper in this field that we could find and asked doctors to explain to me every term,” Scheck told 60 Minutes Australia in 2022.

Scheck’s team found that a growing number of researchers and physicians had major doubts about the theory, and several of them testified in Woodward’s defense. Their argument was that the diagnosis relied too heavily on subjective interpretation and that a generation of clinicians had been “indoctrinated” to believe that a baby presenting with the symptoms of Eappen pointed to a single cause: violent shaking. But Scheck argued, as he later said of the Woodward case, “The scientific evidence demonstrated that she did not do this.”

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For most of human history, having kids wasn’t really a choice. Social expectations, a lack of birth control, and limited autonomy for women presented a simple menu of options: Have kids or join the convent. But after the 1960s ushered in easy, effective contraception and greater career opportunities for women, for the first time in history, many could choose how many children to have—or whether they should have them at all.

Fast forward to today, and more people are choosing not to have children for a variety of reasons. Some say they don’t want kids because of financial strain, or climate apocalypse, or because they simply don’t want them. Others say they do want kids, so they can heal generational trauma, or to give their first kid a sibling. A man once told me it was important for him to bear heirs so he could pass on his spectacular genes. Maybe that’s the underlying motivation, even if most would not put it quite so. . . bluntly. 

Having children is a personal choice. It’s also a choice that has broader, global implications. Everywhere across the world—in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa—fewer children are being born. And strangely enough, having kids has become part of the culture wars. You’ve got pro-natalist public figures like Elon Musk on one side saying everyone needs to procreate immediately in order to save humanity. And on the other side, people like climate activist Greta Thunberg say producing more children in an era of global warming is irresponsible.

But there’s no doubt that the fertility rate is plummeting. Presently, American women, on average, have 1.6 kids. In the 1950s, it was 3. In the U.S., the fertility rate needed for a generation to replace itself without immigration is approximately 2.1 births per woman. Around the world, between 1950 and 2021, as many countries got richer and women chose to have fewer kids, the fertility rate has fallen by more than half.

For economists—and I’m one of them—the speed of this plummeting fertility rate is cause for alarm. Economic growth partly depends on population growth. Retirees rely on younger workers to generate taxes and contributions to Social Security. With fertility rates in free fall, the math doesn’t add up.

So far, our series, Raising Parents, has focused on the state of our children. Today, we cap things off with a fundamental question: Should you even have kids—and what happens if we don’t? 

Spoiler: I won’t tell you whether or not to have kids. It’s a personal decision and also a financial one, a religious one, and for some, a political one. You’ll hear from a range of guests, all of whom I agree with, in part.

For example:

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“We live at a time,” …

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Accidentally ate Brie cheese while pregnant! What to do? 

What if I went in a hot tub for just five minutes at 16 weeks pregnant? Did the fetus melt?

Had turkey sandwich at the airport. Do I have listeria?

Forgot to take prenatal vitamins for three months. Will my baby be less smart?

What if my…

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