How to Be a Parent in 2025

 

Photo by Steve Gale on Unsplash

Note from the author:
This one’s a playful detour from my usual essays on meaning, margin, and the occasional existential unraveling. If you detect a “hint” of satire and sarcasm, congratulations — you’re still emotionally intact. Enjoy this tongue-in-cheek guide to parenting in the age of coconut oil, curated identities, and ambient guilt. Also, OpenAI’s MondayGPT was used extensively in a few of these sections.

Intro

Let’s be real. Being a parent in 2025 isn’t about raising kids. It’s about curating a holistic, tech-moderated, sensory-optimized lifestyle brand featuring your children as emotionally resilient micro-influencers. Gone are the days of peanut butter sandwiches, scraped knees, and running amok with your friends until dark. Now, you’re expected to produce trilingual, gluten-sensitive, empathy-forward thought leaders who compost.

This essential guide is divided into five perfectly balanced, algorithm-friendly sections — each one designed to help you optimize your child-rearing KPIs and make sure no aspect of your minimalist bento-grid parenting aesthetic is left analog, unbranded, or unaddressed.

Section 1: The Environment

Your child must live in a toxin-free, screen-limited, minimalist Montessori microenvironment with natural light, sustainable wood toys, and a Himalayan salt lamp per 100 square feet. Crystals are optional but recommended. Bonus points if the salt lamp is locally sourced and blessed by a doula.

Forbidden:

• BPA
• Phthalates
• Plastics of any kind (unless it’s a Yeti water bottle or Hydrojug)
• Anything with cartoon characters on it
• Red #40 or Yellow #5
• Fast fashion

Section 2: Nutrition

All meals must be organic, pasture-raised, macrobiotic, non-GMO, nut-free, seed-inclusive, Whole30-compatible, and plated like a Pinterest board had a baby with a Michelin chef.

Snacks must come in compostable bento boxes featuring:

• Two almonds (lightly salted with tears of ancestral wisdom)
• Three carrot sticks arranged to resemble a mindfulness symbol
• One gluten-free flaxseed muffin shaped like a non-endangered, woodland creature

Never say “treat.” It’s called a reward-neutral nourishment moment.

Section 3: Education

Your child should attend a school that is:

• Tech-forward but screen-free
• Structure-based but creativity-focused
• Rigorous but emotionally attuned
• Rooted in traditional values but driven by AI-led innovation
• Outdoors, except when it’s hot, cold, wet, dry, smoky, or pollen-adjacent

Also, you need to teach them Mandarin, Python, conflict resolution, and emotional regulation by age 6.

Section 4: Discipline

Discipline is about co-regulation, inner-child healing, and nurturing your child’s inner CEO of a social-mission-oriented-not-for-profit but without bruising their aura. You must be:

• Authoritative but egalitarian (like a democratic monarch)
• Firm but emotionally validating (enforce boundaries, but apologize for them)
• Gentle but not passive (use a soft voice while your child throws a chair. At you.)
• Consistent but flexible (like a morning routine that changes. Hourly.)
• Present but not hovering (be there, but pretend you’re not)
• A safe space but also a growth container (think: womb vibes meets startup incubator)

Time-outs are now considered punitive relics of a less enlightened era. We recommend time-ins — a restorative moment where you and your child sit together in a hand-felted mindfulness nook, sip warm oat or goat milk, and reflect on how the furniture felt when it was thrown. However, if your child resists the time-in because it impinges on their “autonomy narrative,” respect that too.

Just remember: every tantrum is a communication. Possibly about your failure to regulate the home’s humidity levels or your unprocessed ancestral trauma.

Section 5: Activities

Enroll your child in no more than 2.5 extracurriculars unless they have advanced executive function and a well-regulated cortisol response.

Must include:

• One physical (yoga, martial arts, ninja parkour)
• One expressive (ukulele, interpretive dance, spoken-word poetry)
• One STEM-adjacent hobby (robotics, ethical hacking, mushroom foraging)

Be warned: unstructured play is allowed but must be intentional and FaceGramSnapTok-able.

Final Comparison:

How to be a parent in 2025:
Cultivate, regulate, insulate, stimulate, meditate, mediate, educate, communicate, narrate, hydrate, validate, co-regulate, up-regulate, and organically exfoliate — all while never missing a milestone, misaligning a chakra, or overstepping their sovereignty as a sovereign being currently in the third house of emotional development. Your child is not just growing. Oh no, they are emerging, and you, dear guardian, are the attuned vessel through which this ascension must be softly shepherded, ideally during golden hour.

How to be a parent in 1985:
“Go outside and don’t come back ’til dinner.”

How to be a parent in 1955:
“Don’t bleed on the carpet.”

How to be a parent in 1825:
“Survive.”