The other day, a friend confessed her new nightly routine: hiding in the bathroom for 10 minutes after putting her kids to bed. The reason wasn’t to scroll TikTok, but to breathe. “It’s either that or cry into the mac and cheese,” she laughed. It struck me: parenting in 2025 often looks like quietly triaging our own stress while juggling work deadlines, permission slips, Slack pings, and dinner prep.

Headlines scream about the youth mental health crisis, but what rarely makes the front page is the state of the people raising those kids. Working parents are running on fumes. And here’s the part we can’t gloss over: our kids’ emotional health is directly tied to ours.

As psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Raghu Appasani explained to me, emotional regulation is contagious. “Both the calm a

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