If you’re thinking it’s tougher to be a kid these days, you’re right. Sky-high rates of depression, anxiety, and chronic school absenteeism tell us that all is not well. While Covid-19 didn’t help, these trends were in motion well before the pandemic.

After working with over 1,000 kids as a clinical child psychologist, I’ve found that these “signals” are best understood as distress responses. Kids communicate distress through their behavior, much like infants do when they’re hungry, tired, uncomfortable, or having trouble digesting food.

As I write in my new book, “The Kids Who Aren’t Okay,” a range of societal changes in the past few decades has made childhood today more difficult. This is not an exhaustive list, but several factors stand out:

• School shootings: There have been more than 400 since Columbine, creating a persistent backdrop of fear and anxiety for students, educators, and parents alike.
• High-stakes testing: For years, educators have warned that forcing every student to clear the same academic bar, while tying teacher evaluations and job security to those outcomes, ignores developmental differences among children. A more effective approach measures progress relative to each student’s starting point and meets kids where they are.
• Social media and smartphones: At best, they’re a distraction in school. At worst, excessive use can harm mental health. Today’s kids are exposed to the world’s darkest content at far younger ages than previous generations.
• A shortage of mental health providers: In many parts of the U.S., children can’t access care. Long waiting lists are common, and kids in crisis may remain stuck in emergency rooms for days, weeks, or even months.
• Political polarization: The most divided political climate since the Civil War doesn’t stop at adults. Kids absorb it, too.

In 1960, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argued that mental illness is better understood as “problems in living.” While diagnoses can describe how a child is struggling, they often don’t explain why.

Viewing kids’ challenges as problems in living shifts the focus toward identifying what’s causing distress, and fixing it.

Some of the forces affecting kids today are macro issues beyond the control of individual parents and educators. But caregivers can still address the “micro” problems shaping a child’s daily life, including:

• Peer conflicts, bullying or social isolation
• Academic struggles or unresolved learning difficulties
• Family disagreements over screen time, sleep, hygiene, diet or substance use

Helping kids requires a different approach than the one many adults were raised with. Here are a few tips to consider:

1. Make it collaborative, not unilateral

Imposing solutions without input may feel efficient, but it rarely works. Kids are far more invested in solutions they help create. Collaboration also strengthens relationships and communication.

Notably, kids often say adults don’t listen to them, while adults say kids won’t talk to them. All those unilateral solutions take their toll.

2. Be proactive, not reactive

The best time to solve a problem with a kid is not when the problem comes up again. Problems are predictable, so they can be identified and solved proactively.

3. Don’t focus on distress responses (behaviors), but rather the problems that are causing those behaviors

Kids are simply far more likely to talk about problems they’re struggling with than their behaviors.

4. Consequences aren’t good solutions

Rewarding and punishing are motivational strategies, not problem-solving strategies. Consequences aren’t an effective, durable way to treat depression, anxiety, concerning behavior, suicidality, or chronic school absenteeism.

Caregivers are better off recognizing that kids generally want to do well. So what they need isn’t more motivation, but adults who listen, understand and partner with them to solve the problems getting in their way.

If power-and-control parenting worked for you, that’s fine. But your child is not you.

The kids who struggle the most have often experienced more punishment than many adults will encounter in a lifetime. After four decades of working with children and families, my experience is clear: Power and control approaches usually make things worse. If something isn’t working, don’t do more of the same. Do something different.

Ross W. Greene, PhD, is a clinical child psychologist and the author of ”The Kids Who Aren’t Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools.” He served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School for over 20 years, and is now adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech, and in the Faculty of Science at The University of Technology Sydney in Australia.

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While living in the Czech Republic with her grandfather in 2020, Cassandra Tresl, 33, and her husband, Alex Ninman, 34, learned they were expecting their first child.

After welcoming their baby girl, the couple says they considered returning to the U.S. But when they started looking at how expensive it would be to buy a house and pay for child care, they decided to look to Italy instead, where Tresl had read about towns across the country selling one-euro homes.

“I really thought that if I had a kid, I would go back to the States. … And then it ended up not happening, because I realized how much more expensive it would be if we did go back,” Tresl tells CNBC Make It.

Before moving to the Czech Republic, the couple lived in New York City, where Tresl worked in operations at a tech company and Ninman was a butcher at Whole Foods. Even though it had always been the couple’s dream to live in the Big Apple, Tresl says the city’s hustle and bustle made her realize her career wasn’t the most important thing to her anymore.

“If we were going to stay in New York, I would have to continue growing my career,” Tresl says. But although she enjoyed her job, it “wasn’t what I thought about in my free time. Working at a tech company, I would see the people around me really into networking and I didn’t really care about that either.”

“I started questioning everything that was important to others and why it wasn’t important to me. I figured it just wasn’t the right environment for me,” she adds. That realization led her to ask to work remotely, allowing the couple to move abroad.

Tresl and Ninman aren’t alone in their desire to live outside of the U.S. About 1 in 5 Americans say they want to leave the U.S. permanently, according to a 2025 poll from Gallup. And in Italy specifically, the cost of living is 9.5% lower than in the U.S., according to Numbeo, which tracks global cost-of-living data.

In the late 2010s, towns across Italy gained attention for selling off deteriorating properties for 1 euro (about $1.05 USD at the time), with a goal of attracting foreign investors to buy the houses, rehab them and drive up the dwindling population numbers. Since dozens of towns announced these plans, hundreds of homes have sold, The Guardian reports.

Seeing stories of people buying up these homes inspired Tresl to start looking for a home in Italy herself, she says.

Tresl’s first step was to determine the actual cost of purchasing one of the one-euro homes, since they weren’t looking to spend more than 20,000 euros (about $23,627 USD) on the purchase price. Despite the marketing, buyers generally needed thousands of dollars or euros on hand for renovations, since most of the properties were dilapidated or had been abandoned for years.

In October 2021, the couple went on a house-hunting trip to Italy and viewed about 15 homes across Abruzzo and Tuscany.

“I’m a spreadsheet type of person, so I had all the pros and cons of all these houses and it came down to Abruzzo being a much better value in general,” Tresl says.

Considering their limited budget and the fact that Tresl knew they would need more money on hand for renovations, the couple settled on a two-floor, two-bedroom house just under 1,076 square feet. Tresl says they picked it for the price and the terrace view. 

The couple closed on the house in February 2022 in an all-cash deal for 11,500 euros, or about $13,150 at the time, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. They moved into the house in July 2022 and finished most of the renovations in the fall. They spent about $18,000 on the renovations.

The purchase price allowed the couple to buy the property outright, which “alleviated a lot of stress in multiple areas of my life,” Tresl says. “If my income fluctuates or money gets tight, at least we don’t have a mortgage and our family has a secure roof over our heads. This financial freedom was actually one of the main factors that made this move and decision possible.”

That financial freedom has allowed Tresl to step away from “a career I was never truly passionate about in the first place,” she says. Since moving to Italy permanently, Tresl left her tech job and started creating content for her travel blog and newsletter. She also works for another travel blogger as an operations manager.

“I’ve had the opportunity to be a little ‘reckless’ in a good way and start exploring my own ventures, creating multiple income streams that are fully mine,” she says.

Since moving, Tresl says the couple spends lot less day to day, partially due to the fact that they are in a small town versus a larger city.

“We genuinely want to respect the economic habits of our surroundings,” she says. “We don’t want to come into a place and inflate things with our spending, especially when salaries here are comparatively low, which is why things cost less. It feels important to be mindful of that and maintain some responsibility.”

In 2024, Tresl and Ninman acquired a second property in Italy, which they rent on Airbnb for up to 85 euros, or about $101, per night. Ninman left his job as a butcher when the couple moved out of the U.S., and now manages the Airbnb property.

Located in the countryside of their town, the single-story two-bedroom, one-bathroom house sits on its own land and has a private garden. The couple bought it for 17,000 euros, or about $20,083, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Tresl says she estimates they put another 10,000 euros into it during renovations.

In Italy, the couple only spends about $1,246 per month, including utilities and living expenses. Here’s a breakdown of their monthly expenses, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. All figures are rounded.

• Groceries: 480 euros a month (about $567)
• Electricity: 217 euros (about $256) every two months
• Tresl’s gym membership: 115 euros (about $136) every three months
• Water: 91 euros (about $108) every two months
• Daughter’s gymnastics: 50 euros (about $59) per month
• Airbnb supplies: 50 euros (about $59) per month
• Daughter’s preschool: 40 euros (about $47) per month
• Internet: 12 euros (about $14) per month per house

In the winter, they also pay up to 200 euros a month, or about $237, per home for heat. Annually, the couple pays 286 euros, or about $338, per house for garbage pick up and about 61 euros, or around $72, in property taxes for each house.

The couple’s rental property brings in between 8,000 and 10,000 euros, or $9,486 to $12,000, a year, Tresl says.

“We earn the most money from it when someone decides to stay long-term, which happens quite often, where a couple or a small family works remotely and will rent the house for three to six weeks at a time,” she adds.

Since they clean and maintain the rental property themselves, Tresl says their only monthly expenses for the Airbnb are utilities, including electricity, Wi-Fi and heat during the winter. Annually, they also cover property taxes and garbage pick up.

Instead of being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of New York City, Tresl’s life in Italy involves walking her daughter to school and working from home. She goes to the gym in the afternoon. On Fridays, Tresl and her daughter go to an archery class. On weekends, the family likes to do what Tresl calls “urban hiking,” or exploring different towns around Tuscany.

“The mentality here in Italy is so different because work really is not the most important thing,” she says. “The people have shown me that it’s OK to slow down and it’s something I’m still trying to adapt to.”

Conversions from euros to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to $1.18 USD on Feb. 17, 2026. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

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Growing up in Iowa, Steven and Ashley Evans knew all about the local fire station in Cedar Rapids because it was right by the high school they both attended.

“We always dreamed we’d live here one day. It went up for sale and we thought we’d come check it out,” Steven, 40, tells CNBC Make It. “When we tell people we live in an old firehouse, everyone around here knows exactly where it is and which one it is.”

The station was first built in 1960 and converted into a home by its previous owners in the 1980s. In 2016, when the Evans first saw it was for sale, listed for $125,000, it had been abandoned for years and was covered in black mold.

“We had no intentions of purchasing it because we didn’t have the finances at the time,” Ashley, 33, says.

In 2016, she was working as a dermatology nurse, and Steven had a job working with adults with special needs and owned six rental properties. They owned a house they paid $65,000 for, Ashley says, but “my parents actually had to cosign on the house because we just couldn’t afford it. … It was $550 a month, and we were just struggling.”

Still, they decided to take a look at the firehouse. Even when they had to sign waivers to enter because it was deemed a safety hazard due to the mold, they weren’t deterred.

“The thing that attracted me the most to the fire station would be the fact that it’s all concrete and steel. The bones were solid, the house was level; any other house would have fallen over easily by now,” Steven says.

Without letting Ashley know, Steven put in an offer of $90,000 and it was accepted. He came clean the next day — he says he wanted it to be a surprise to Ashley that he bought the fire station they used to always see by their high school.

The property was listed as a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house with 3,100 square feet of space, but it turned out to be almost double that size since the listing only included the finished square footage, not the unfinished square footage, Steven says.

In order to finance the purchase, Steven applied for a construction loan of $170,000 under his rental property business, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The couple says they did it that way because their original plan was to renovate the fire station and resell it.

Steven says that because of all the work the property needed, they didn’t think they would ever be able to live in it. When the couple closed on the property in June 2016, it lacked walls, electricity or even a working toilet.

With an estimated budget of $80,000, the Evans started on the renovation, with Steven doing most of the work himself to save money. They rented out the house their parents cosigned with them and moved into the fire station while they renovated. Ashley’s parents even moved in with them to help pay the renovation-related bills.

Here are some of the biggest expenses the couple encountered while renovating. All amounts are rounded.

• Paint: $1,100
• Drywall: $4,000
• Flooring: $5,000
• Kitchen addition: $10,000
• Roof: $22,000

“Whatever we could find on clearance, whatever people wanted to give us, that is how we would remodel it. Just trying to make it look the best we can on the cheapest budget,” Ashley says.

“If it didn’t match, we’d spray paint it to match,” Steven adds.

Although the couple had to essentially remodel everything, they kept some original details from the fire station, including the old hose tower, the garage doors and a historic plaque outside. They kept the massive skylight the previous owners had installed to cover a courtyard that was originally part of the fire station as well.

To pay homage to the station’s history, the couple also bought an old fire truck to put in their backyard for their kids to play with.

The couple made the space their own by adding a theater room and a playroom for their kids that looks like a soccer field with fake turf.

“We had friends who had an indoor soccer field [growing up]. I always thought it was the coolest thing ever. I remembered it even as an adult, so I decided to create one down here,” Steven says.

In 2019, Steven and Ashley refinanced their original loan into a mortgage to officially purchase the home in their names. They secured a 5.5-year balloon mortgage for $225,000 at a 4.89% interest rate, with an estimated monthly payment of $1,455, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. When the term ended in 2024, the couple refinanced into a new mortgage; now their monthly payment is around $3,190 and their interest rate is 7.59%.

The couple also remodeled their kitchen recently, which they financed with a home equity line of credit.

Here the monthly expenses related to the house:

• Electricity: $17.49
• Internet: $186.85
• HELOC for kitchen renovation: $423.65
• Utilities: $475.99
• Gas: $426.93
• Solar panels: $553.98
• Mortgage: $3,190.05

Since the couple started sharing what life is like in the fire station on social media years ago, viewers always ask if they will ever leave or sell the property, they say. But the couple says even if they ever move, they will never sell the fire station.

Instead, in 2020, Steven and Ashley bought the house next door for $180,000, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Ashley’s parents have taken ownership of the property, she says.

Last year, Ashley and Steven also bought another house near the fire station for $175,000. They call it their “cozy cottage” and have it listed on Airbnb for $160 to $189 a night. It is fully booked through March.

“We talk about what it would be like to live in a house that was already finished all the time … But also, I can’t imagine living in a house that was completely new and that we didn’t put any blood, sweat and tears into,” Ashley says.

“It’s a dream home for our kids to grow up in. And just for us to be so proud that we can provide for our kids to grow up in this home, it means a lot,” she adds.

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Julia Holden can relate to the struggle of getting your baby to fall asleep.

In February 2024, she and her husband noticed that their newborn son Maxime fell asleep more quickly when his eyes were gently covered with a burp cloth or small towel, she says. As a new mom “in survival mode,” Holden quickly looked for a purchasable product — a comfortable eye covering that’d stay on his tiny face if he moved — but couldn’t find one she liked, she says.

As a younger adult, Holden had dreamed of entrepreneurship, so her near-instant thought was to make this product herself and sell it, she says. She designed a baby hat with an attached eye covering, named her side hustle Sleepy Hat and, over the course of the next year, spent nearly $16,000 from her personal savings to bootstrap the business, she says.

Since June 2025, the business has brought in five figures in revenue each month, including over $90,000 in December and more than $69,000 in January, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The company is profitable, says Holden, who initially launched it while working full-time as a senior relationship manager for an advertising company and taking care of her baby.

She found time for Sleepy Hat in 20-minute windows between breast-feedings at her home in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, she says. “I had no outside funding, no team and no child care beyond family help,” says Holden, 34.

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Holden quit her job — which paid her $95,000 a year, she says — in October to focus on Sleepy Hat full-time. Most of its profits have been reinvested back into the business, including payroll for two-part-time contractors who help with inventory and running ads on Google and Amazon, she says. “I also recently took on an advisor, [who has] a little bit of equity,” Holden says.

Holden paid herself $2,500 from the business in 2025, and has been living off her remaining personal savings and her husband’s income as an assistant director at Princeton University. She works anywhere from 30 to 60 hours per week, including weekends, she says.

Doing all of that while being a mom to a now-2-year-old is taxing, but since she sets her own schedule, she can at least take more time during daylight hours for herself and her family than she did at a 9-to-5, she says.

“I’m still stressed, but for a more meaningful reason,” says Holden. “It feels more important. It’s much more satisfying.”

Holden didn’t have “proof of market fit” when she decided to launch Sleepy Hat, she says. Rather, she brought the idea to other moms in her circle, who she says all called it “genius.”

She intended to spend about $10,000 launching the business, and surpassed her budget on “product development, creating patterns, creating prototypes and samples … and then all the tiny little things that add up, like purchasing a domain, a trademark [and] building a website,” she says.

She didn’t have a design background, so the first pattern she and her mom created together resulted in a hat that was “completely the wrong size,” she says. An entrepreneur friend referred her to a factory in China, which sent her prototypes. But her “tech pack” — a garment blueprint for manufacturers, essentially — initially wasn’t detailed enough, resulting in about $1,500 worth of defective products, she says.

After finalizing the product’s design and ordering 1,500 units, Holden “splurged” on a photographer to fill a website for Sleepy Hat with professional-looking images, she says. The website launched in September 2024, and didn’t receive many sales until around December, when Holden posted her product and website on online marketplace Grommet, she says.

Sleepy Hat ended the year with just under $2,000 in total sales. “My first sale from a stranger was life-changing,” says Holden. “I was so excited but also terrified to actually ship the product.”

Holden joined Amazon as a third-party seller in August 2025. Roughly around then, her posts on Sleepy Hat’s TikTok account started gaining traction, with some garnering hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes. Moms bonded in the comments over their “FOMO babies” who fought sleep while on walks, car rides or in restaurants, saying they “needed” the hat for their kids.

Most of Holden’s sales now come from paid online advertising, she says. She’s designing Sleepy Hats with new patterns and materials, improving her social media strategy and updating her packaging, she adds.

“The goal is to increase my own salary on a quarterly basis this year,” says Holden. “I hope to double what I pay myself in Q2 in April … I hope next year to be able to pay myself actually more than what I was making at my full-time job, so six-figures plus.”

Holden isn’t technically a first-time entrepreneur — she previously started a short-lived T-shirt brand and website for women runners — but she’s still working on her financial acumen and organizational skills, she says. She’s worked with an accountant, alongside her advisor, to help her cover that weakness, she says.

“You need to understand every dollar that’s coming out and every dollar that’s coming in,” she says. “And I’m not particularly finite. I just don’t gravitate towards spreadsheets … So it’s definitely been a learning curve to force myself to take the time and understand the balance sheet and where every dollar is going, and it’s still a work in progress.”

Holden has also learned the value of trusting her gut, she says. She recalls a moment when her sister, who owns a PowerPoint tutorial business, advised against launching a startup as a new mom.

“She was like, ‘I would not start a business right now. You’re [freshly] postpartum,’” Holden says. “And I was like, ‘OK, I hear you. I’m going to do it anyway.’”

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Andy Hill is coasting.

The 44-year-old and his wife have built up a net worth north of $1 million, and for now, neither plans to add another dollar to their long-term investments. Instead, they’ll let their money to continue to grow, secure in the knowledge that they’ll have enough to retire by the time they get there.

The strategy is known as “Coast FIRE,” a variation on a movement short for “financial independence, retire early.” In the early days of FIRE, many of its adherents pursued a straightforward objective: sock enough money away in investments to be able to leave your job and live off of distributions from your portfolio indefinitely.

In 2016, shortly after Hill began a side gig hosting the “Marriage Kids and Money” podcast, he began to do exactly that, insisting that he and his wife save as much as they could in order to retire as quickly as possible. The resulting friction over money landed them in couples therapy, Hill says.

Hill emerged with a new outlook on managing money as a couple — a philosophy he shares in his new book, “Own Your Time: 10 Financial Steps to Put Your Family First and Escape the Corporate Grind.” The goal, he tells readers and clients of his financial coaching business, isn’t to get to the retirement finish line as soon as possible, but to secure your future while creating the freedom to spend on the things you value now.

That process, Hill says, with starts with encouraging couples to dream together rather than diving straight into numbers.

“Really most of the time should be spent on, what do I want out of my life? What do I desire for my dream life?” Hill says.

To narrow in on the answer, Hill urges couples to ask themselves some big questions, such as:

• If I got a $5 million check in my mailbox tomorrow, and I didn’t have to worry about money anymore, what would I stop doing immediately?
• What am I constantly worried about, and what can I do with my money to help me eliminate those worries?

Getting to the bottom of these questions as a couple can give you a roadmap of where to put your money first, says Hill. If your biggest worry is losing your job and losing your home, for instance, you might focus your joint financial energies on paying down your mortgage, he says. If your biggest dream with a windfall is guilt-free travel, you might prioritize building a vacation fund.

“It’s about starting from that position of dreaming and then sharing those dreams with your spouse, asking them to do the same, so that you can come together for some cool family goals that work for both of you,” Hill says.

For Hill, and for many of the couples he works with, the ultimate goal is what he calls “time freedom.” After putting enough money in your investment accounts to “coast” to retirement — an amount that requires some future projection that’s worth discussing with a financial professional — you can use money you would have been socking away to enrich your life, either by spending more on things you want or by effectively buying back your time.

“Do we want to inflate our lifestyle and just have more fun, or do we both want to work less?” Hill says.

Hill and his wife have taken the latter approach, using their financial flexibility to scale back at work. Hill’s wife left a job in marketing to return to school and now works part-time as an esthetician. Hill went into business for himself full-time in 2019.

“The year I left my corporate career, I was making around $180,000 per year working 40 to 50 hours per week,” he says. “This year, I’m paying myself $100,000 working 20 to 25 hours per week.”

Couples with this kind of extra time can use it to be more present parents and partners, focus on their health, care for aging parents and devote more time to hobbies and passions, Hill says.

“There’s so many other things that you can do with your life besides working,” he says.

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