For the last 6 months I have attended near weekly meetings of the “Parenting in the Time of Relentless Parenting,” led by Mary Dalton and her son Christopher Fontana. A group of two dozen parents, from Seattle, to Colorado, to Texas and Pittsburgh, begins the meeting each week by discussing a few assigned chapters from the classic parenting text, Children the Challenge, and then Mary Dalton performs a “family demonstration”—an intensive intervention, using one family per week, during which the parents testify to the most difficult child behaviors they are facing, and Dalton offers a set of challenging suggestions for behavior modification—not for the children, but for the parents.

Since the spring I have come to know more about Harrison, a four-year-old who dumped sand and sprayed Lysol onto his mother’s bedroom carpet while she was teaching elementary school in the next room; Allison, a six-year-old who covered her feet in lipstick and traipsed around—but only after dumping all the shelved books in the house upon the floor; and the four Johnston children, who constantly torment their mom, their new baby brother, and their stay-at-home dad with their noisy brawling.

Here, on planet Zoom, I have found the camaraderie and support I was seeking during that chaotic spring of 2019. Every week a different family shares a new problem. Every week a different family testifies about new successes. As part of our practice we regularly thank each other for the vulnerability required to share our difficult stories. In these difficult times, as we face a global pandemic, mounting domestic inequality, existential climate change, a racial reckoning, and constant political churn, I am so grateful that the pandemic has delivered us the opportunity for solidarity and community around the most difficult thing I’ve ever done: become a parent.