Raising a Five-Year-Old in the Middle of America’s Nervous Breakdown

My kid is five.
He still believes the moon follows our car.
He asks if bugs have moms.
He thinks tomorrow is a concept you can hold if you grip it hard enough.

And I am raising him in a country that feels like it’s constantly clearing its throat before saying something awful.

America right now feels like a room where everyone is talking at once, no one is listening, and the TV is too loud. It’s a place where every scroll brings a new emergency, every headline sounds like a warning label, and every “this is unprecedented” somehow feels… routine.

Trying to explain the world to a five-year-old inside all of that is its own kind of impossible.

At five, they’re learning big things:
What’s fair.
What’s kind.
What happens when someone hurts you.
What rules matter—and which ones don’t.

At five, they also ask questions with no filter and no agenda. They ask because they genuinely want to understand. And sometimes I don’t know how to answer without lying, panicking, or breaking my own heart.

“How come that man is yelling?”
“Why are people mad?”
“Why does that sign say that?”
“Why do some kids get lunch and some don’t?”

I want to give him truth without trauma. Context without crushing him. Honesty without stealing his softness.

That feels harder now than it ever did before.

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America Feels Loud. Childhood Is Quiet.

There’s a disconnect between the volume of the country and the innocence of a child’s inner world.

Adults argue about rights, borders, bodies, books, and who deserves what. Meanwhile, my kid is deciding whether today is a dinosaur day or a truck day. He’s learning how to lose a game without flipping the board. He’s practicing apologizing when he doesn’t really mean it yet. But he is learning why it matters.

And I wonder constantly:
How do I raise someone good in a system that rewards cruelty?
How do I teach empathy in a culture addicted to outrage?
How do I explain fairness when the rules clearly aren’t?

Some days it feels like parenting is an act of resistance.

Not the loud kind.
The quiet, boring, relentless kind.

The kind where you say “we don’t talk like that” for the millionth time.
The kind where you model consent by asking before hugs.
The kind where you explain that people are different.

The kind where difference does not equal danger.

The kind where you choose not to pass down your own fear.

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The Weight of Knowing Too Much

One of the strangest parts of being a parent right now is knowing too much.

We know too much about violence.
Too much about corruption.
Too much about systems failing in slow motion.

And yet, our kids know almost none of it.

They are not meant to carry the weight of the world yet. That’s our job. But the weight leaks. It shows up in our tone, our exhaustion, our scrolling at night after they’ve fallen asleep.

I feel it when my kid asks if he’s safe.
I feel it when he worries about things he shouldn’t even know exist.
I feel it when I realize he’s watching how I react more than he’s listening to what I say.

He is learning America through me.

That is terrifying.

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What I Choose to Teach Anyway

I can’t control the state of the country.
I can’t soften every blow waiting for him out there.

But I can choose what grows in our house.

I teach him that feelings big aren’t bad, but actions have consequences.
I teach him that saying sorry means trying again, not just saying the word.
I teach him that bodies belong to the people inside them.
I teach him that kindness isn’t weakness and loud doesn’t mean right.

I teach him to ask questions. Even uncomfortable ones. Especially those.

And when I don’t know the answer, I say so. Because pretending adults have it all figured out is how we got here.

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Hope Isn’t a Vibe. It’s a Practice.

People say “kids give me hope,” but that’s not quite true.

Kids don’t magically fix the world.
They just remind us what it looks like before it’s broken.

Hope isn’t something my child hands me.
Hope is something I build for him.

It’s choosing honesty over apathy.
It’s choosing softness in a culture that confuses hardness with strength.
It’s choosing to raise a kid who knows how to care. Even when caring is inconvenient.

America feels unstable right now.
But every night, my five-year-old asks for one more story.
Every morning, he believes the day might be good.

So I keep going.
I keep teaching.
I keep trying to be the adult I wish more adults had been.

Not because I think it will save the country.

But because it might save him.

And right now, that's all I can do.