Teen girls on TikTok are looking into the camera with the intensity of Joan of Arc. Their lips say “Yes you can.” The text over their heads says things like:

• “Go out with him. Age is just a number.”

• “Meet him tonight. You only live once.”

• “Send it. He’s different.”

Cue the applause. Cue the likes.

Cue the algorithm dragging more and more girls into this odd little confidence cult where empowerment gets weaponized into a gateway drug for exploitation.

The #YesYouCan trend wants to look like a pep talk. But for many mental health professionals, it reads more like a pamphlet for digital grooming.

The first generations of Americans diagnosed with autism in childhood are now entering old age.

Yet eldercare systems—Medicare, senior housing, memory care—were never built with neurodivergent aging in mind.

Autism. ADHD. Sensory processing disorders. Dyspraxia.

These don’t disappear with age. They evolve.

And the support systems that served these individuals in youth and adulthood often vanish in old age. The result? A silent crisis of unmet needs—and a dawning recognition that eldercare must evolve, too.

It usually starts with something sweet.

A baby’s first wobbly step, recorded on a phone. A photo of a child asleep in the car seat after a long day at the beach.

A TikTok with a pretty piano track and a soft-focus toddler meltdown. These moments feel private—but they’re not.

Welcome to sharenting, the modern art of broadcasting parenthood.

And right next to it, making sourdough and arranging little flowers in milk-glass vases, we find the tradwife—a woman who’s not just choosing domestic life, but doing so with intention, aesthetic elegance, and sometimes a ring light.

These two trends may seem different, but together they raise important questions: what happens when motherhood becomes a performance?

Who benefits when domestic life is publicized? And how do we honor both privacy and choice in a culture that rewards constant visibility?

Franz Kafka never had children.

But if he had, he might have written something eerily familiar to modern mothers scrolling TikTok: a scene in which the father is present but not quite involved, lovingly useless, narratively adjacent.

In today’s digital parenting memes, he’d be the guy holding the diaper bag like a defeated sherpa while the mother sprints behind a tantruming toddler.

This phenomenon has a name now: passenger parenting.

It’s not exactly negligence. It’s not even intentional.

It’s more like a kind of soft resignation—a sleepwalking through fatherhood. And while it’s getting laughs online, it’s costing families something real and measurable.

In the final year of his life, Franz Kafka—forty years old, frail from tuberculosis—was living in Berlin with Dora Diamant, the woman who had brought light into his darkest years.

He had at last found love, and some measure of peace, if not health.

Each day, he walked slowly through the gardens of Steglitz Park, a place of green quiet where the world seemed gentle enough to bear.

One afternoon, as he and Dora walked, they came upon a little girl sitting alone, her face hidden in her hands, sobbing.

Kafka knelt beside her and asked softly, “Why are you crying?”

“My doll is lost,” she whispered. “I can’t find her anywhere.”

Moved by her sorrow, Kafka offered to help her search. The three of them looked together, combing the bushes and paths, but the doll was nowhere to be found.

At last, Kafka said, “Let’s try again tomorrow.”

When the girl returned the next day, Kafka met her with a letter.

“It’s from your doll,” he said.

By the time you’re 22, your frontal lobe is just barely open for business, your student debt has metastasized into a personality trait, and you’re beginning to suspect that your so-called adult life might be an elaborate payback plan for how your parents raised you.

Welcome to Italy, land of espresso, existential dread, and—if recent research is to be believed—overprotective parenting that can quietly fry your nervous system.

A recent study by Italian researchers Martina Smorti and colleagues (2024), published in the Journal of Psychology, took a magnifying glass to the Italian family dynamic and discovered something unnervingly elegant: the way your parents bonded with you—whether they coddled you like a houseplant or cared for you like a sentient being—echoes forward into your adult life through the neurotic relay race of anxiety and anger.

Let’s be honest: crying at weddings, baby showers, graduation ceremonies, or during the last 10 minutes of a Pixar film shouldn’t make sense.

And yet there you are—bawling into a cocktail napkin because someone else said “I do.”

WTF? These are happy moments, so why is your body leaking saltwater like it just lost a dog?

Let’s cut to the chase. It’s your brain’s fault.

And like most things involving the human brain, the reason is a gloriously chaotic cocktail of biology, memory, and social survival strategies dressed up in a tuxedo of neuroscience.

Imagine two people building a house together. One wants open windows and a cozy fire. The other wants triple-lock security and solar panels.

Neither is wrong. But the house starts to creak.

This is not a metaphor. This is Tuesday night in your kitchen.

Coined by Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery way back in the late ’80s, Relational Dialectics Theory (RDT) says this: every intimate relationship is a negotiation of tensions between opposing needs. Not once. Not twice. But constantly.

Which means if your relationship feels like a tug-of-war between “I want closeness” and “I need some damn space.”

Congratulations: you're normal.

Although Relational Dialectics Theory officially entered the academic chat in the late 1980s, but the theory's DNA traces back to the 1960s—an era when Americans were splitting atoms, burning draft cards, and moving into open-plan marriages with closed-door feelings.

There’s a specific kind of loneliness that only happens in long-term relationships.

It doesn’t come with shouting matches or dramatic exits.

No, this kind sneaks in through the back door with a smile and a perfectly normal tone of voice.

It sounds like this:

“No, it’s fine.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“I don’t want to make a thing out of it.”

Congratulations. You’ve become emotionally polite. And, if you're not careful, terminally nice.

Let’s be clear: kindness is great.

Kindness helps marriages survive cancer, financial ruin, and IKEA furniture assembly.

But chronic niceness—that careful editing of your inner world for the sake of peacekeeping? That’s a different animal entirely.

And according to a growing body of real, peer-reviewed science, it’s not intimacy. It’s invisible slow-motion emotional avoidance.

You settle onto the couch, popcorn in one hand, remote in the other.

Maybe you're planning to zone out to As Good As It Gets or rewatch Love Story for the third time.

But what if this wasn't just a casual night in? What if it was a research-backed ritual for making your relationship stronger?

Enter: cinema therapy for couples—an intervention so utterly simple and elegant, so deceptively low-stakes, that it flies under the radar.

But recent research shows it may be just as powerful as traditional couples counseling.

Oops. I said the poverty-inducing for couples therapists part out loud!

Done right, it turns your movie night into a shared emotional mirror—one that helps you feel closer, argue better, and remember what you like about each other in the first place.

If it feels like your home has turned into a command center for nervous system triage, you’re not imagining it

.

The cultural noise is louder. The news cycle is meaner. Sensory inputs are stacking up.

And for neurodivergent folks and their families, these moments don’t just register as “stressful”—they register as existential threats to internal equilibrium.

In neurodiverse families, the intensity of each member’s experience may differ widely. So when the world gets shaky, the differences in how you each process that shakiness become more pronounced.

And that’s when the misunderstandings start.

Something is pressing down on families right now.

You can hear it in the sighs between chores, in the snapped “what?” that wasn't meant to sting, in the tense silences over dinner.

When global stress spikes—whether due to economic instability, political upheaval, climate anxiety, or community trauma—it doesn’t stay outside our doors. It moves in with us.

If your family feels more brittle, more fatigued, or more reactive lately, you are not alone.

This is what shared uncertainty feels like in close quarters. And this post is here to remind you that you can still build emotional safety and resilience right in the middle of it all.