Behavioral expectations are different today compared with “old-school parenting”: emotional regulation has replaced obedience as one of parenting’s central goals. A “tantrum” is not disobedience or a willful, naughty child trying to get their own way, it’s a stress response from a developing brain. People are challenging an inherited culture that denies or dissociates from pain and largely seeks to repress emotions. While once children would fit around the lives of their parents, now parents fit their lives around their children. This is not small work.
