Why Parenting and Teaching Feel Harder Than Ever, and What Actually Helps

So many parents, teachers, and school leaders have been asking a similar set of painful questions:

Why do small things with my kids turn into big meltdowns?
Why don’t the strategies that used to help with kids seem effective anymore?
Why does being with my kids take so much out of me, even on our good days?

Many parents have begun calling this experience parent burnout, a feeling that can show up even when relationships are loving and intentions are strong. Educators feel it as well.

When I first began hearing these concerns, I was skeptical. I’ve been a parent and a school leader for decades. And since the late 1990s, accelerating around the early 2000s, I’ve heard some version of the same refrain.

Raising and teaching kids is more demanding now.
There’s more stress. Behaviors are worse.
The world is changing faster than ever. Working with kids feels harder than it’s ever been.

Over time, my skepticism softened because the complaints rang true. Working with kids genuinely did seem more difficult than in the past. Small frustrations were derailing both children and adults in ways that felt way out of proportion. And once things went off course, it was taking longer and requiring more effort to regain footing.

I felt it myself. Typically resilient, I noticed that at certain moments I was having out-of-proportion reactions to small frustrations that I would normally handle with ease. It confused and troubled me. Wanting to understand what was happening, not just personally but collectively, I turned to the research with a simple question.

Has something actually changed, making parenting and teaching harder now?

The answer was a resounding yes.

Across education, mental health, occupational health, and developmental psychology, researchers have documented a clear shift over the past fifteen to twenty years, with growing intensity in recent years.

The finding isn’t simply that life is more stressful. It’s that the nature of stress has changed.

Stress used to come in waves, followed by time to recover. Today, what is frequently missing is time to reset between stressors. This is due, in large part, to the pace at which daily life now moves and the weakening of boundaries that once helped contain stress.

Transitions happen back to back, with little space in between. Work spills into home life. Family demands overlap with professional responsibilities. When something doesn’t go as planned, there is often no extra time and no additional support to absorb the disruption. Under these conditions, it takes significantly more effort to stay grounded and regain footing, even after relatively minor challenges.

Within this faster, more compressed pace, expectations on both children and adults have quietly shifted. Children are frequently expected to manage intense feelings more quickly. At the same time, parents and educators are expected to remain present and composed for longer stretches of the day, often with less support and fewer breaks. This leaves adults depleted and less available to provide the guidance children need.

Researchers describe the result as cumulative load. When stress remains active and recovery is limited, the systems that help us stay calm, flexible, and connected become taxed. Over time, even small frustrations can tip us off balance. Reactions feel bigger, and it takes longer to regain equilibrium.

Taken together, what parents and educators were experiencing and what the research was showing pointed to the same conclusion. Parenting, teaching, and being a kid really is harder right now.

In schools, this pattern is often described as teacher burnout, but what educators are reacting to is not just exhaustion, it’s sustained strain without adequate time or conditions for recovery.

Not because adults are less skilled, less committed, or less capable than before, but because there’s a growing mismatch between what is being asked of us and the conditions we are living within. Seen through this lens, what we often call burnout is less a personal failing and more a predictable response to ongoing demand without sufficient recovery.

Understanding this mismatch changes the question we need to ask.

Instead of wondering why children or adults seem to be struggling more, we can begin with a more useful question: What helps restore capacity when recovery time has been squeezed out of daily life?

So What Actually Helps?

When stress is cumulative and recovery time is limited, doing more is not the answer. What helps is rebuilding the conditions that allow both adults and children to regulate their emotions, have the space and support to recover, and grow in sustainable ways.

Instead of asking children to manage intense emotions more quickly or expecting adults to absorb more stress with fewer supports, I began focusing on what helps people stay centered, make intentional choices, and regain balance in the face of frustration, challenge, and adversity.

That focus led me to purpose, understood not as an abstract ideal, but as a guiding value that anchors us in moments of both challenge and possibility. For me, that anchor value, that grounding purpose, is well-being, understood simply as finding our way to being okay.

With an anchor value, other values naturally flow, guiding how we think, choose, and respond. For example, connection, care, resilience, meaning, and belonging become some of the pathways through which well-being is cultivated for ourselves and for others. While many values continue to resonate, returning to a single guiding value in moments of stress or uncertainty reduces mental load, sharpens focus, and makes it easier to act with intention.

There are many possibilities for a grounding value, including peace, connection, belonging, voice, community, and love. Putting purpose first invites each person to choose an anchor value, a purpose that resonates most deeply for them. That chosen value becomes a clear point of orientation to return to in moments of stress and uncertainty.

What Changes When We Put Purpose First?

Putting purpose first isn’t about adding another expectation or setting a lofty goal. It’s about anchoring daily life in what matters most, especially when navigating frustration, challenge, or adversity.

Under stress, both adults and children can lose their sense of direction. Decisions become more reactive. Interactions feel rushed. Small irritations carry more weight than they should.

Purpose changes that.

When adults are grounded in purpose, they’re better able to stay present, make clearer choices, and respond with intention rather than react impulsively. Children, in turn, feel more secure and supported, even when emotions run high.

Purpose First doesn’t ask anyone to be calmer, more patient, or more connected. Instead, it restores the conditions from which calm, patience, and connection naturally grow.

The VIP™ Model: Vision, Implementation, Purpose

When life feels stressful, people don’t lose their values.
They lose their orientation.

Under stress, it becomes harder to remember what matters, harder to decide what to do next, and harder to act in ways that align with who we want to be. That’s not a failure of character or commitment. It’s what happens when cognitive and emotional load is high.

And so, I created a simple guiding model: VIP™, or rather Vision, Implementation, and Purpose.

Vision helps us clarify where we’re headed and what kind of humans we and our children are becoming in the process.

Implementation keeps us grounded in reality, helping us see how our vision shows up in everyday moments, and how lived experience can refine and expand that vision.

Purpose anchors both vision and implementation in meaning, values, and humanity in a clear, concrete way.

The VIP™ model is how purpose is made practical. By clarifying vision, staying rooted in real-life implementation, and returning again and again to what matters most, VIP™ gives people a clear point of orientation and a shared reference for everyday decisions. From that grounded place, growth can unfold even in the face of challenge and adversity.

→ Explore the Purpose First workshop

The G.R.O.W.T.H.™ Framework: Building the Conditions to Thrive

Once people are grounded in what matters most and have a clear point of orientation to return to, the next question becomes practical.

How do we build the capacity to live into that purpose, especially under real-world conditions?

That is where the G.R.O.W.T.H.™ Framework begins.

While VIP™ restores orientation, G.R.O.W.T.H.™ focuses on rebuilding the conditions that allow people to regulate, recover from stress, and grow, even when those conditions are strained or missing in the broader world. Rather than treating growth as an individual trait or a one-time outcome, the framework recognizes that growth happens when the right conditions are intentionally created and sustained.

The elements of G.R.O.W.T.H.™ are designed to work together. They strengthen inner capacity, support recovery from adversity, anchor people in relationships, shape environments that reflect our values, elevate the power of everyday moments, and foster shared capacity to grow together. Together, these elements form a cohesive framework. Each one highlights a specific condition that supports growth.

G - Grounding in Inner Strengths
Children and adults thrive when character is nurtured from the inside out, not imposed from the outside in.

→ Explore the Grounding in Inner Strengths workshop

R - Resilience
Parenting and teaching are meaningful, joyful, and often stressful. How we respond to stress‬ becomes a powerful lesson for children in facing life’s challenges.

→ Explore the Resilience workshop

O - One Caring Adult
Every child deserves at least one adult who sees their strengths, believes in them, and helps them‬ believe in themselves. Every adult deserves that as well.

→ Explore the One Caring Adult workshop

W - World-Shaping Environments
Children explore who they are and what matters most to them through the environments in which they live and learn. When we intentionally design those environments as microcosms of the world we wish to create, reflecting what‬ we believe truly matters most, we nurture the development of character rooted in meaning and purpose.

→ Explore the World-Shaping Environments workshop

T - Tiny Everyday Moments
The small things are the big things and when we act in alignment with our purpose and values in the small moments, we cultivate strength and resilience that lasts a lifetime.

→ Explore the Tiny Everyday Moments workshop

H - Harmony in Action
When parents, educators, and caregivers believe that together they can make a meaningful‬ difference, children benefit in lasting ways. Collective belief fuels collective action. It’s not just about working side by side to support our children to thrive. It’s about sharing a sense of‬ purpose, trusting in one another’s strengths, and choosing to show up, again and again, for the‬ children in our lives.‬

→ Explore the Harmony in Action workshop

What Becomes Possible When Purpose Comes First

Putting purpose first doesn’t remove stress or simplify life. But it does change how we face frustration, challenge, and adversity.

When we’re anchored in what matters most, we’re less likely to react from depletion and more able to respond to difficulty with clarity, focus, and the values we hold dear. Growth no longer depends on pushing harder or fixing faster. It becomes something we can sustain, even when conditions are imperfect.

Choosing purpose first gives us a way to orient ourselves when small things feel big and recovery takes longer. It restores the capacity to respond with intention, even under ongoing strain.

And that is how real growth happens.

Categories: : burnout, leading, overwhelm, parenting, Purpose First Foundations, purpose inspired education, Stress, teaching