I M GOING TO BE HONEST with you. For years, I felt nervous about writing a parenting book, for a couple of reasons.

For one, I m still parenting three kids at home. Sure, we re long past the infant, toddler, and preschool years, so I m not a total rookie, but the thing about parenting is that just when you think you re getting the hang of one stage of development, they move on to another one, and you feel like a novice again. Wouldn t it be better to wait till the kids have fully launched as adults to sit down and compile all my parenting advice? And really, with a high schooler, middle schooler, elementary schooler, husband, small family farm, and a full-time job, who has time to write a book?

For another, my dad, Danny Silk, already wrote a great book on parenting,Loving Our Kids on Purpose. I got pretty much all of my tools as a parent and family coach from him and my mom. What could I add to their teaching that would justify a whole new book on the subject? My life has enough pressure there s no need for me to reinvent the wheel here.

And then we hit 2020 and 2021 two years that upended life as we knew it for almost everyone. As if marriage and parenting weren t hard enough for everyone, we had to throw a pandemic into the mix and add a few new extra challenges working from home; setting up and monitoring home schooling; returning to school with masks and social distancing; coping with the cancellation of sports, performing arts, and many activities our kids were involved in; and the greatest challenge of all trying to comfort, protect, and lead our kids in an anxiety-filled, divisive, confusing, and uncertain environment that we ourselves didn t understand, which was also testing the limits of our emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

I had multiple parents coming to me for family coaching appointments during those two years and confessing that they were losing it at home with their toddlers and young school-aged children like never before. I thought I loved my four-year-old, but now that he can t go to daycare, I basically want to kill him. Other parents were at a loss trying to respond to teenagers whose mild acting out had suddenly escalated to asking to be put on antidepressants or hormones because they had decided they were now transgender. Marriages were strained to the breaking point; I can t remember any other two-year period in which I saw the connection between so many couples tested so intensely. Decisions over how to navigate holiday gatherings and other events caused significant damage to relationships with extended family members. Somehow this crisis got even Christians to contemplate walking away from lifelong friendships and relationships over their conflicting views . . . and some actually did just that.

THE ROOTS OF OUR DISCONNECTION

One of the strangest things about that crazy season was that, unlike other national crises or t