See if you can find it. See if you can find one point in history. See if there has ever been a time when kids weren’t like this—when they weren’t loud and messy, ungrateful and disrespectful, when they weren’t prone to making mistakes, when they didn’t struggle, when they weren’t sarcastic and rebellious and petulant.

Despite what the cultural commenters say, despite what your own parents or your own memory might want you to believe, kids have always been like this. Kids have always been kids. There is a 4,000-plus-year-old stone, found in Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia, which details the same cliche complaints about “kids these days” that you might hear on a podcast or on social media. An ancient Egyptian letter survives, which we’ve talked about before, in which a preteen son rails and fights ungratefully against their father, in exactly the same tone you might have heard from your own teenager.

This is what kids do! This is what they’re like!

Why?

Does it even matter if it is a fact of existence? But if you must know, they’re like this not because you did anything wrong or because there is anything wrong with the culture—kids are like this because it’s hard to be a kid. Because they are by definition immature. They are by definition developing. Literally, their brain is still developing!

So this is how kids have always been, it’s how your kids will be, and how future kids will be. Which is to say, difficult. Which is to say, a handful. Which is to say impossibly loud and also heartbreakingly cute and funny and absurd.

Why would you expect anything different? Why would you think you’d be exempted? Why are you so easily surprised or frustrated by it? Why are you so eager to blame? What you need to do is understand. What you need to do is accommodate. What you need to do is get ready. Because this is how it is and how it will always be.