Figure it out, or ask

Parents have been raising children since the beginning of time. They learned from watching their parents and grandparents, from friends and neighbors and the accumulated wisdom of a trusted whisper network that had already figured out everything worth knowing. It was a gloriously imperfect improvisation in all the ways that didn't matter and inspired in every way that did. For millennia, kids were raised anyway, clumsily, haphazardly, often magnificently. Eventually there was one book—the massive eighties bestseller What to Expect When You're Expecting—but that was really about navigating pregnancy and surviving the bewildering first months of a new baby, not about raising a person. Then the internet arrived. The great leveler and democratizer of worlds. A global village that promised to make everything fairer, more connected, more equal. We got some of that. The rest we never saw coming. Once the platforms took over and built things they hadn't fully thought through, the world was…