Not Happiness. This.
- righttrackparentin
- Jun 2
- 7 min read
What 77% of parents are really asking — and the ancient Greek word that answers it.
The Number I Can't Stop Thinking About
A new national report landed in my inbox recently and I have not been able to put it down.
It's called Rattled: Tracking the Experiences of Families with Infants and Toddlers in 2025, published in May 2026 by Zero to Three. And one number in it stopped me completely.
77%.
Seventy-seven percent of parents of infants and toddlers said they could benefit from additional resources and support around parenting and child development.
I have been a speech-language pathologist for more than thirty years. I became a parent coach. I am building an AI parenting companion at RaisingHumans.ai. And when I read that number, I did not think: how alarming. I thought: of course. I thought: this is why.
The report also tells us that nearly one in five parents screened positive for elevated anxiety and/or depressive symptoms — a three-year high. That concerns about children's learning, development, and behavior doubled from any previous year since 2020. That the researchers describe a "chain of hardship": material stress leading to parental emotional distress leading to worry about children's development.
And yet — and this is the part I want you to really hear — 97% of parents reported consistent or increased quality time with their children. They are reading. They are singing. They are maintaining routines. Under conditions that are genuinely, documentably hard.
These parents are not failing. They are showing up — fiercely, consistently, lovingly — even when they are rattled to the bone.
What they are asking for, underneath all of it, is not a technique. It is not a checklist. It is not even, I would argue, information. It is something much older than that.
The Word We've Been Missing
There is a Greek word — eudaemonia (yoo-dy-MON-ee-ah) — that describes a kind of well-being rooted not in happiness, but in meaning. In purpose. In virtue. In the fullest expression of what a human being can be.
Aristotle considered it the highest human good. Not pleasure. Not comfort. Not the absence of difficulty. Eudaemonia — a life that is genuinely, deeply, meaningfully lived.
Four of my five children carry names rooted in Greek and Byzantine tradition — Calliope, Evangeline, Stella, Constantine. The language of Aristotle runs in their names and, although Michael’s name is of Hebrew origin, their Greek roots run in all of their bones from their dad, (along with Polish and German roots coming from me). But I did not have to know the Greek word to have been aiming at the concept for thirty years of clinical work, and for all the years I spent raising five children.
I never set out to raise happy children.
I set out to raise humans who knew why they were here.
Eva
My daughter Eva — Evangeline, which means bearer of good news — graduated with a degree in creative advertising. She was great at it. She won an award for a student project. She found joy in it. Building a campaign, watching an idea move people. But joy and purpose are not always the same thing, and Eva knew the difference.
In the spring of 2023, she went to Vietnam for the first time. Something happened to her there — the kind of something that doesn't announce itself loudly, but that you feel in your chest long after you've come home. She wanted to get back desperately. So she made a plan: teach in the United States for a year, earn her TEFL certificate, build her experience. In October 2024, she boarded a plane for Vietnam and committed to two years.
She is already talking about re-upping for two more.
Vietnam is inexpensive enough that she can work as much as she needs to and still have a significant stretch of time for what she finds truly meaningful: her art. She paints. She photographs. She writes poetry. Lately she has begun combining all three in ways that are novel and entirely her own.
She recently sent me a series of photographs she took of a mother cow and her calf — black and white, close, intimate — alongside a piece of writing she called Mothering:
"Mothering honors all mothers who impart important cultural and societal knowledge onto their children, while also sacrificing their own autonomy across physical, emotional, and social dimensions. We observe here a mother cow and her calf developing an intimate bond created through shared senses of touch, hearing, and smell. It is evidence of deep understanding and caring of one another. Moreover, Mothering narrows its lens on this particular mother-child dynamic, by highlighting the communication with each other, through their strong eyes and the ways their bodies yield to their own desires." — Eva Zarpas
She painted a t-shirt for a market at which she would sell her handmade art— a red plastic stool ringed by yellow stars on a black background. The red plastic stool is a cultural institution in Vietnam: the great social equalizer, the piece of furniture on which a business executive and a street vendor sit at exactly the same height, inches from the pavement, side by side. Red, in Vietnamese culture, means luck, happiness, and prosperity.
She hand-lettered a onesie for a baby shower with the words: Eat fresh mango. Hug your friends. Make wishes on stars. Swim often. Admire the moon. Enjoy the sun. Read good books. Be curious. Make art. Always love the child in you. She included a copy of my Wonder Before You Worry guide — which her friend called, without prompting, a keepsake.
And then she posted the butterfly photograph. A woman on a beach, black and white, with painted wings in the most vivid blue (The hero image of this blog, if you want to scroll back up). She captioned it in Greek letters first — μεταμόρφωσι — and then in English: metamorphosis. She set it to Lionel Hampton's "A Taste of Honey," a recording from 1964 that has the particular warmth of something that was already old when it was new.
Even though the distance from her best friends and her family costs her something real, Eva will tell you often that she is living her best life.
I believe her. I know her. What I see is not just happiness — though she is happy. What I see is a young woman who knows why she is here, what she is meant to make, who she is meant to be with, where she is meant to be. She is living a eudaemonic life. And I feel it in my whole heart.
What You Are Actually Doing
Here is what I want to say to the 77%. And honestly, to the 23% too.
When you are reading to your baby at 6am because you haven't slept and the day has not yet technically begun — you are doing more than building language. You are building a self. When you sing the same song for the forty-seventh time even though it makes no earthly sense anymore, you are saying: you belong here, in this world, with these sounds, with me. When you maintain a routine through a week that has cost you something, you are not just managing a schedule. You are handing your child the experience of a life that holds.
The chain of hardship the RATTLED report describes is real. Material stress is real. Parental anxiety is real. The worry about whether your child is developing, thriving, becoming — that worry is real, and it deserves real support.
But underneath all of it — under the developmental checklists and the sleep regressions and the screen time debates — is a question that is ancient and human and profound:
Am I raising a person who will know why they are here?
You are. Even when it doesn't feel like it. Especially then.
Eudaemonia is not something you give a child in a single moment. It is something you build, incrementally and imperfectly, in ten thousand ordinary interactions. In the way you respond when they are afraid. In the way you let them try and fail and try again. In the way you stay present, even when it costs you.
The families in the RATTLED report — anxious, exhausted, carrying too much — are doing this. Right now. Today.
And so are you.
A Note About LUMA
The 77% is why I'm building LUMA — an AI-powered parenting companion launching soon at RaisingHumans.ai. Not to replace the humans in your child's life. Not to give you another thing to manage. But to be there at 2am when you're wondering if what you're seeing is normal, and to hold the kind of research-backed, clinically-grounded information that used to live only in the offices of people like me.
LUMA exists because every parent deserves a co-pilot. Not an expert telling you what to do. A companion who helps you wonder before you worry.
It's coming soon. And it was built for you — all 77% of you, and the other 23% too.
About the Author
Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland, MA, CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist with more than 30 years of experience working with children and families. She is the founder of Right Track Parenting and the creator of the Investigative Parenting methodology — a research-backed framework that guides parents to wonder before they worry, imagine before they interpret, and create before they catastrophize. Cindi holds a Certificate in the Foundations of Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and is a certified Parent Coach through the Parent Coaching Institute. She runs a direct-pay private practice in Northern Virginia and is the creator of LUMA, an AI-powered parenting assistant available at RaisingHumans.ai (coming soon!). Learn more about Cindi and Right Track Parenting at righttrackparenting.com.
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