Depleted parents can't access the parenting tools they know. Key points • Chronic stress limits access to brain regions responsible for self-control and empathy during parenting. • Your nervous system may activate childhood patterns before your brain can intervene in stressful moments. • Stress, sleep deprivation, and mental health issues deplete the resources emotional regulation needs. Finding effective parenting advice on discipline can feel overwhelming especially when your kids won't listen, and you're tired of parenting struggles. Many parents wonder why parenting is so hard these days, and look for practical parenting strategies for defiance that actually work. On the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, I spoke with parents Adriana and Tim about what it's like to reach that breaking point—when you're tired of parenting but still want to do right by your kids. This post explores why even well-informed parents struggle to use the parenting tools they know—and what's really happening when you can't parent the way you want to. Why Parenting Feels So Hard These Days Parenting has always been demanding. But today's parents face unique challenges. We're trying to stay calm, empathic, and connected while juggling endless responsibilities, limited rest, and constant comparison on social media. No wonder parenting feels so stressful. Here's the core problem: Most parents today are emotionally aware enough to know what to do, but they're too depleted to actually do it. This gap between knowledge and capacity is where exhaustion turns even gentle parenting into frustration. Adriana captured this perfectly: "My values did not align with my actions as much as I wanted them to." She and Tim had read so many books, and listened to endless podcasts. They understood respectful parenting. And when they were depleted—when both kids were hungry and screaming and one just threw a toy at the other one's head—they defaulted right back to what they saw growing up. Why Generic Advice Falls Short The parenting books don't know your specific triggers. They can't tell you how to work with your nervous system when your child screams "I hate you!" and your whole body floods with cortisol because that's exactly what your father used to say before things got violent. This happens because our nervous system stores patterns from childhood and activates them before our thinking brain can intervene. Tim grew up hearing "men don't cry" and "don't let anybody disrespect you". Adriana grew up in an abusive, neglectful environment, basically raising her younger brothers while their mother struggled with alcoholism. They'd both done recovery work. They had good values. And their bodies still reacted before their brains could catch up. Even if you had a "normal" childhood, it’s possible that your needs weren’t met, which could have created a trauma-like response in you that’s now expressed as anger toward your kids. You're trying to implement new skills during the worst possible conditions. The skills you practiced in calm moments don't automatically transfer to high-stress situations without support and practice. That's why all those memes you've saved from Instagram or TikTok don't help: When you're actually stressed, everything you know flies out the window. What Happens When You're Too Tired to Parent We're used to thinking of exhaustion as being about sleep, but parental burnout is different. It's more like emotional depletion. When your stress levels stay high, your brain's capacity for patience, reasoning, and empathy drops. You might know the "right" response but find yourself yelling, shutting down, or giving in. Research shows that chronic stress limits access to the parts of the brain responsible for self-control and empathy. When your nervous system is dysregulated, no amount of conscious effort can override the body's stress response. Adriana struggled with postpartum depression and anxiety for two years after having her second child. "Treating my mental health problems is more than just 'go take a bath.' The bath totally helped. But there was more to be done." She knew what she was supposed to do. And she still couldn't do it when she was in the thick of it. Signs You're Operating on Empty You know what to do but can't actually do it. You snap before you can stop yourself. You say things you regret. You parent in ways that don't match your values. This happens because emotional regulation requires significant cognitive resources. When those resources are depleted by stress, sleep deprivation, or mental health challenges, your brain literally cannot access the tools you know intellectually. Adriana and Tim kept asking themselves: "When are we going to stop just surviving?" They were doing everything they could: mindfulness, meditation, reading books, listening to podcasts. And every day still felt like just making it to bedtime. When you have multiple kids, it can sometimes seem impossible to meet all their needs simultaneously. Both kids melting down at the same time. Both desperately wanting to be held. One child crying while you're helping the other. Everyone upset — and then you explode, and feel guilt and shame for it. You apologize to your kids and say it won't happen again…and feel shame all over again when they say: "But you said that last week too." When Parenting Advice Backfires Well-intentioned advice like "stay calm" or "take a deep breath" can create shame when you can't implement it. You beat yourself up for not being able to do what seems simple on paper. You wonder what's wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. You're trying to use tools designed for calm conditions in emergency conditions. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe; it's just not what your kids need right now. Understanding this distinction between your capacity and your values is essential for healing the shame that keeps you stuck. Final Thoughts The gap between knowing what to do and actually being able to do is a capacity issue. Your nervous system is responding to stress exactly how it was trained to respond: through patterns formed in your childhood. When you're depleted, your brain can't access the parenting tools you know intellectually. Generic advice fails because it doesn't account for your specific triggers, your nervous system's patterns, or the reality of trying to learn new skills under high-stress conditions. But recognizing depletion as the root cause rather than blaming yourself or your child opens up new possibilities. Source of the article

Counting castes in India has always been about more than numbers - it is about who gets a share of government benefits and who doesn't. The country's next national census, scheduled for 2027, will - for the first time in nearly a century - count every caste, a social hierarchy that has long outlived kingdoms, empires and ideologies. The move ends decades of political hesitation and follows pressure from opposition parties and at least three states that have already gone ahead with their own surveys. A 2011 survey - neither run nor verified by census authorities or released by the government - recorded an astonishing 4.6 million caste names. A full count of castes promises a sharper picture of who truly benefits from affirmative action and who is left behind. Advocates say it could make welfare spending more targeted and help recalibrate quotas in jobs and education with hard evidence. Yet in a provocative new book, The Caste Con Census, scholar-activist Anand Teltumbde warns that the exercise may harden the deeply discriminatory caste system, when the need is to dismantle it. The argument cuts against the prevailing view that better data will produce fairer policy. For Mr Teltumbde, castes are "too pernicious to be managed for any progressive purpose". "Caste is, at its core, a hierarchy seeking impulse that defies measurement," he writes. Mr Teltumbde sees the modern caste census as a colonial echo. British administrators began counting castes in 1871 as a "deliberate response to the post-1857 unity of Indians across caste and religion", turning it into an "effective tool of imperial control". They held six caste censuses between 1871 and 1931 - the last full caste enumeration in India. Each count, Mr Teltumbde argues, "did not merely record caste, but reified and hardened it". Independent India, in Mr Teltumbde's reading, preserved the system under the moral banner of social justice, "while effectively evading its core obligation of building the capacities of all people, which is a prerequisite for the success of any genuine social justice policy". The obsession with counting, he says, bureaucratises inequality. By turning caste into a ledger of entitlements and grievances, the census reduces politics to arithmetic - who gets how much - rather than addressing what Mr Teltumbde calls the "architecture of social injustice". He sees the demand for a caste census as a push for more reservations - a cause driven by an "upwardly mobile minority", while the majority slips into deprivation and dependence on state aid. Nearly 800 million Indians, he notes, now rely on free rations. Affirmative action quotas were first reserved for Dalits - formerly known as untouchables - and Adivasis (tribespeople), India's most oppressed groups. But soon, the less disadvantaged "other backward classes" (OBCs) began clamouring for a share of the pie. Politics quickly coalesced around demands for new or bigger caste-based quotas. Mr Teltumbde's deeper worry is that enumeration legitimises what it measures. Political parties, he warns, will exploit the data to redraw quotas or convert caste resentment into electoral capital. For Mr Teltumbde, the only rational politics is one of "annihilation of caste", not its management - echoing what BR Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, argued when he said that caste cannot be reformed, it "must be destroyed". But in an India where even its victims "see value in its preservation", that goal feels utopian, the author admits. The looming caste census, Mr Teltumbde argues, will not expose inequality but entrench it. Many scholars don't quite agree, seeing the census as a necessary tool for achieving social justice. Sociologist Satish Deshpande and economist Mary E John call the decision not to count castes "one of independent India's biggest mistakes". Today, they note in a paper, caste has come to be seen as the burden only of India's lower castes - Dalits and Adivasis - who must constantly prove their identity through official labels. What's needed, they write, is "a fuller, more inclusive picture where everyone must answer the question of their caste". This isn't an "endorsement of an unequal system", they stress, but a recognition that "there is no caste disprivilege without a corresponding privilege accruing to some other caste". In other words, the lack of reliable caste data obscures both privilege and deprivation. Sociologist and demographer Sonalde Desai told me that without a fresh caste census, India's affirmative action policies operate "blindly", relying on outdated colonial data. "If surveys and censuses could shape social reality, we would not need social policies. We could simply start asking questions about domestic violence to shame people into refraining from wife-beating. We have not asked any questions in the census about caste since 1931. Has it eliminated caste equations?" she asks. Political scientist Sudha Pai, however, broadly agrees with Mr Teltumbde's critique that counting castes can solidify identities and distract from deeper inequalities based on "land, education, power and dignity". Yet she acknowledges that caste has already been politicised through welfare and electoral strategies, making a caste census inevitable. "A caste census would be useful if the income levels within each caste group are collected. The government could then use the data collected to identify within each caste the needs of the truly needy and offer them the required benefits and opportunities, such as education and jobs for upward mobility," Dr Pai says. "This would require moving away from simply using caste as the parameter for redistribution of available resources, to use of both caste and income levels in policymaking." Dr Pai argues that if done "thoughtfully" - linking caste data to income and educational indicators - it could shift India from a "caste-based to a rights-based welfare system". Yet, scholars warn that counting castes and interpreting the data will be fraught with challenges. "It won't be painless. India has changed tremendously in the century since 1931. Castes that were designated as being poor and vulnerable may have moved out of poverty, some new vulnerabilities may have emerged. So if we are to engage in this exercise honestly, it cannot be done without reshuffling the groups that are eligible for benefits," says Professor Desai. Another challenge lies in data collection - castes have many subgroups, raising questions about the right level of classification. Sub-categorisation aims to divide broader caste groups into smaller ones so the most disadvantaged among them receive a fair share of quotas and benefits. "Castes are not made of a single layer. There are many subgroups within a single caste. What level of aggregation should be used? How will the respondents in a census respond to this question? This requires substantial experimentation. I do not believe this has yet been done," says Prof Desai. Mr Teltumbde remains unconvinced. He argues that endless enumeration cannot remedy a system built on hierarchy. "You will be counting all your life and still not solve the caste problem. So what will be the use of that counting?," he wonders. "I am not against affirmative action, but this is not the way to do it." Source of the article

Planets grow from protostellar material in disks, leading to full-grown planetary systems in time. At last, the final gap has been filled. Here in our Universe, one thing we could have been certain of, even before we began to examine or even detect worlds beyond our own, is that the Universe does have a mechanism for creating planets and planetary systems in orbit around stars. We have some supremely strong evidence that indicates there must be a pathway for that to occur: the existence of Earth and the other planets orbiting our own Sun. Because we exist, and our planet and the other planets in the Solar System exist, then the Universe must have some way of creating these planets. So how is it, exactly, that planets actually form within our Universe? To answer that question, we need to look to the Universe itself. Sure, we have theories that detail how planets could form, and by combining two fields of astronomy that might seem barely related — cosmology and exoplanet studies — we can learn an awful lot about the cosmic story that brings planets into existence. But even with all we learn from that, including the conditions under which stars can come to possess planets, we still have gaps in our understanding. In an ideal world, we’d have no gaps at all: we’d be able to trace the story of planet formation, step-by-step, from a pre-stellar cloud of material to a fully grown-up and evolved system of mature planets. Since we don’t have tens of millions of years to sit around and watch a system form and evolve, this might seem like an impossibility. But with the new discovery here in 2025 of planet WISPIT 2b, we’ve finally filled in the last “missing link” in the cosmic story of planet formation. Here’s what we know and how we got there. From a cosmic perspective, we know that the very first stars in the Universe couldn’t have had planets at all. In the aftermath of the hot Big Bang, the Universe went through several important phases in its early evolution. An early quark-gluon plasma state cooled, creating bound hadrons: specifically leading to a dense, expanding sea filled with protons and neutrons. Slightly later, nuclear reactions began occurring, as protons and neutrons fused together without immediately being blasted apart, creating an initial abundance of the light elements and their isotopes. And then, significantly later, neutral atoms formed, followed by the gravitational growth of overdense regions. Once enough matter accumulates in one pocket of space, star-formation, for the first time in the Universe, can finally occur. But back in these early stages, planet formation is impossible. When these new stars form, sure, there’s going to be abundant reservoirs of material surrounding them: material that you’d think could wind up forming a planet. However, that material is almost exclusively hydrogen and helium: some 99.99999991% percent hydrogen and helium, by mass. With so few heavy elements, whatever doesn’t become a star simply gets blown away. What would it take to enable planets to form, then? We’d need, at the very least, for sufficient enrichment of that star-forming material to enable the existence of planets at all. Here in our own Solar System, where we have the eight known planets, we can be confident that we’re above that enrichment threshold. But is there a hard line, above which we’re all but guaranteed to form planets, while below it, planet formation is forbidden? To answer that question, we have a way of finding out: we can look at the stars in our vicinity and search for planets around them. Then, at the same time, we can measure the heavy element content (what astronomers call “metallicity”) of the parent star (or stars), and see which stars do and don’t have planets. As it turns out, here in our modern Milky Way, about 80-90% of the stars that we can detect are consistent with having planets around them, but not 100%. It appears that, if you have about 25% or more of the heavy elements found in our Sun, you’re almost guaranteed to have planets. If you go down to between 8% and 25% of our Sun’s heavy elements, you may or may not have planets. And if you look down at star systems with below 8% of the Sun’s heavy elements, very few of them have planets, with no systems below 1% having any planets at all. With over 6000 detected exoplanets in the book, this tells us where planets have and haven’t formed. That information serves as the starting point for our big planet-formation question: how do we go from a cloud of gas that’s going to collapse to form stars to a full-fledged star system with a system of planets around it? Before we get to the evidence, we should be fair to the theorists, and note that there’s been at least an outline of a theory for planet formation that’s many decades old: older than any of the observational evidence we have for how planets actually do form. In sequence, the steps that should occur look like the following. First, a cloud of gas collapses and fragments, leading to the existence of many different sites within a gas cloud where either a new star (singular) or a system of new stars (two or more) will form. Next, around these protostars, a disk-like distribution of gas and dust — made from the same elements that the star and its progenitor gas cloud are made from — comes to surround them. After some time as a homogeneous disk, instabilities begin to appear, including gaps, spirals, and dense rings of material, leading to feature-rich structure within those disks. At some point, usually after the protostar’s ignition into a full-fledged star, that circumstellar material (i.e., material that surrounds the star) gets blown away, eliminating the protoplanetary disk and leaving just a series of planets, plus the remnant dusty debris. And finally, later in the star system’s life, the dusty debris gets eliminated as well, leaving just a mature planetary system behind. That is, in theory, at least, how planets ought to form. Many of these steps have strong evidence supporting them. For example, as you can see in the above image, you can look inside of star-forming regions and observe the protostellar cores of a variety of newly forming stars found within. What we find by doing so is extremely reassuring: that gas clouds that collapse to form new stars do indeed undergo fragmentation. When we see a newly formed star cluster, with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of new stars inside, it’s easy to assume that it’s only much later — when the cluster dissociates — that our modern star systems mostly made of singlet, binary, and trinary star systems (with a few larger multi-star systems) arise. But this modern, high-resolution data, acquired with telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimetre/sub-millimetre Array (ALMA), shows that binary and trinary systems are common even from the earliest stages of star-formation, and that while singlet stars are still the majority, it’s mostly the low-mass stars that form singlets, while the highest-mass stars tend to wind up in multi-star systems. It looks like, based on the best observational data we have, that the first theorized step in forming planets has gotten it exactly right: gas clouds collapse and fragment, leading to the existence of many different, disconnected sites where new stars and protostars arise. Then, we can look into slightly more evolved star-forming regions, such as the nearby Orion Nebula, and find young stars and protostars that still have protoplanetary disks around them. Indeed, these systems are incredibly common wherever ongoing new star birth is happening, with the Orion Nebula simply representing the closest location to us where a large amount of new star-formation is still ongoing. Over 100 protoplanetary disk-containing objects — young stars and protostars — have been spotted in the Orion Nebula alone with the combined data from Hubble, JWST, ALMA, plus other infrared and radio telescopes. Originally, these protoplanetary disks appeared to us as mere blobs: as dark silhouettes in visible light and as bright sources of emitted light at infrared wavelengths. However, as we began to leverage better techniques, with high-resolution imagery enhanced by modern instrumentation and through the technique of very-long baseline interferometry, we began to probe these protoplanetary disks for features within them. Particularly useful when the disk is seen face-on (as opposed to edge-on or highly inclined), we sometimes saw uniform, featureless disks, but at other times we’d see features like spiral waves, rings, or gaps within these disks. Starting in the early 2020s, we began to see an age difference between the systems that were featureless and the ones that exhibited non-uniform features. In particular, there were three categories that these protoplanetary disks fell into: systems under 0.5 million years in age, all of which appeared to have uniform disks, systems older than 2 million years, all of which appeared to have feature-rich disks, and systems between 0.5-and-2 million years, where some have uniform disks and some display features. Also, systems that were significantly older than 10 million years in age tended to lack protoplanetary disks entirely, indicating that the process of planet formation begins early and completes in relatively swift fashion in the Universe. Finding features such as “gaps” and “rings” in protoplanetary disks are relatively common, and it’s generally suspected that the reason for these gaps-and-rings is simple: those are regions where the protoplanetary material has been “vacuumed up” by planets and protoplanets that are forming in precisely those locations. There’s no material there anymore because it has already formed into a planet; the young planet has already cleared its orbit of potentially planet-forming material. This was bolstered in 2023, with the detection of exoplanets PDS 70b and PDS 70c in the same system: found in the inner portions of a cleared-out young star system, one that still had an extant outer protoplanetary disk. At still later times, of course, we’ve detected many fully mature planets within planetary systems — including via direct imaging when they’re well-enough separated from the parent star — both within systems that still have a debris disk and in systems whose dusty debris disk has fully evaporated. It would seem, then, that we’ve come a phenomenally long way in learning where exoplanets come from. Protostar cores form from gravitational collapse, those protostars develop circumstellar disks, those disks develop instabilities which lead to gaps in the disk, where protoplanets and eventually full-fledged planets form within those disks, the disks themselves then evaporate, leaving mature planetary systems behind. However, there’s been a missing link in this chain of understanding for a long time now. Although we can image the disks and see the gaps within them, and we can directly image planets at later stages of evolution orbiting their stars, we’ve never seen a disk, with gaps, that also contains an observable planet within those gaps. In other words, we’ve only suspected the presence of planets within these gaps in protoplanetary disks; we’ve never detected one directly. Or, at least, that was the case until just a couple of months ago here in 2025, when the first planet within a protoplanetary disk gap was discovered: WISPIT 2b. In a pair of papers recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, high-resolution direct imaging of the protoplanetary disk around the solar-analog star WISPIT 2 revealed many different properties. There is: an extended disk, spanning hundreds of times the Earth-Sun distance, with a multi-ringed substructure within the disk, hinting at the presence of planets in the gaps between the rings, and a young, massive protoplanet embedded within one of the gaps and co-moving along with its host star. That planet, WISPIT 2b, is the first unambiguous planet found within a multi-ringed disk, with an impressive mass of 4.9-5.3 times the mass of Jupiter. It’s well below the threshold for becoming a brown dwarf (which requires at least 13 Jupiter masses), the age of the parent star is consistent with the previously uncovered timeline of planet formation (it’s about 5 million years old), and the star itself is relatively nearby at 133 parsecs (~430 light-years) distant. The studies also suggest that mass is continuing to accumulate onto this young planet, growing at a rate of 4.5 quadrillion tons per year, or approximately by the mass of Mars’s larger moon Phobos on a daily basis. Although there’s also circumstantial evidence for a second, innermore, even more massive planet (around 9 times the mass of Jupiter) located closer to the parent star, the big news is that the most significant “missing link” in the planet-formation story — the disconnect between where gaps form and when planets appear — has now been filled in with the discovery of WISPIT 2b. Now, we can be certain: yes, there is indeed evidence that when we see a gap in these protoplanetary disks, we can be confident that planets do indeed form those gaps. The fact that the size of the gap and the mass of the planet are both compatible with theoretical models of the physics at play only strengthens the science case for this interpretation. Excitingly, this suggests that high-resolution direct imaging observations carried out for nearby young stars with current technology can reveal, at the very least, the most massive new planets to form in these star systems. Where we see gaps in protoplanetary disks, we now have direct evidence linking the presence of planets to the existence of those gaps: perhaps even a full 100% of gaps in these disks are caused by planets. The WISPIT survey, standing for Wide Separation Planets in Time, leverages the SPHERE instrument aboard the ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the University of Arizona’s MagAO-X adaptive optics system aboard Carnegie science’s Magellan telescope: two of our current generation of flagship-class telescopes. It’s almost a certainty that more planets will be found in protoplanetary disk gaps in the coming years, giving us our first end-to-end confirmation of a scenario for how the majority of planets in the Universe actually form. Source of the article