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Whether it’s the out-of-nowhere, ear-piercing shriek in the coffee shop, the relentless toy-banging in the doctor’s waiting room or the seemingly endless stream of “Why?” questions, the feeling that other people’s children are annoying is surprisingly common. And if you’ve ever felt that way, you’re definitely not alone.

It’s not that we’re heartless monsters. But there’s something about the unbridled enthusiasm, the unfiltered honesty, and the sheer volume of some little humans that can test the patience of even the most even-keeled among us.

We may find other people’s kids annoying for various reasons, often tied to behavior, expectations or environment. Dr. Matthew Morand, a licensed psychologist, told HuffPost this topic comes up more than people think. His advice? “Minimize the negative voices in your head.”

But how, when you’re at your wit’s end?

First, keep this basic principle in mind.

Morand’s strategy is simple: “Utilize ‘the other shoe’ mentality. If I were to count how many times a child has kicked the back of my head on an airplane, I could sue their parents for traumatic brain injury. Most people’s responses typically go right for the negative and pass judgment. I ask them, and ask myself, ‘Have my children not been the difficult ones?’ How can I get angry at that child when I have literally worn the other shoe?”

Dr. Kristen Piering, a licensed clinical psychologist, agrees. “If you’re annoyed by a kid out in public, keep in mind that we need kids to experience these places to learn how to engage appropriately in society.”

She added, “Kids are people, too, and can have bad days like anyone else. If they act in a way you find ‘annoying,’ they may have had a rough day at school or a fight with a friend.”

Consider whether the source of the problem is the kid or the parent.

Parents can relate, but what about those of us without kids? Morand says, “Focus on whether the parent is cognizant of their child’s behavior. We can give credit and find a sense of calmness in respecting that parenting is hard, and if that parent is trying to address the behavior, then that is all that really matters.”

And sometimes it’s not even the kids themselves. It’s the parents. The ones who seem blissfully unaware (or just don’t care) as their little ones dismantle the local bookstore or treat public spaces as their personal playgrounds (and garbage bins). It’s the “hands-off” approach taken to an extreme, leaving the rest of us to contend with the resulting bedlam.

That said, what you see isn’t always the whole story. Piering said, “Not everyone parents the same way, and that’s OK. You have no idea what goes on in their home, and something that might seem like an odd parenting choice to you may have come from years of knowing their child and what works best for their child and their family.”

Follow a 3-step rule to keep your frustration in check.

So, how do we navigate this minefield of mini-humans without losing our marbles? Perhaps some expert-advised strategies for keeping your sanity intact (even when surrounded by the most lively of children) can help before we pull our hair out.

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Hans Neleman via Getty Images We’ve all been here.

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I often ask my kids to help around the house. Feed our dog. Put clean dishes in cabinets and drawers. Sweep up crumbs after dinner. We are a Montessori family, so a lot of this stuff falls under Practical Life, and it’s supposed to help with motor skills, executive functioning, and caring for our spaces. We are also a Scouting family so, “How do Girl Scouts leave a place?” I ask my troop far too often. “Better than we found it!” Indeed.

But the kvetching. “Moooooommmmmm. I can’t. My legs don’t work.” “None of my friends have to do this stuff.” And my favorite: “I neeeeeeed to be a kiiiiiiid.”

The drama. But that last complaint resonates. Every family handles chores differently. Some parents hold off to “let kids be kids,” with the idea that children will eventually learn how to do laundry and clean dishes and do all the adult things. But is there any value in chores? Are the kids who do them benefiting in any way? I turned to Rebecca Scharf at the University of Virginia Medical School, a pediatrician who investigated this question in a recent study. Our conversation is below, edited lightly, as I stare down stacks and stacks of laundry that certain children might have to participate in folding. Assuming their arms don’t suddenly stop working.

The term “chore” has kind of this negative connotation, at least according to my kids. What qualifies as a chore?

Yeah, I hear that. From my perspective, it is something that a child has responsibility for that’s contributing to the household. It’s those daily tasks that we do that keep up our environment or help us participate in family life.

And you decided to study how children who do chores fare?

Yes. I’m a developmental pediatrician, and lot of the things I’ve researched come out of clinical practice. For this one, I was working with one of my colleagues, Dr. Elizabeth White, and she and I were talking about children’s sense of agency, or competence, especially girls, around science. We were looking at this dataset and came upon these questions. The surveyors asked third graders across the U.S. to rate themselves on a variety of things, like “I am good at math. I am good at science.” The sense was, “I am capable. I can do things.” So part of this dataset asked parents, “Does your child have chores?” And we found that children who were doing chores often, or very often, as the survey asked, were more likely to have a sense of capability or more of a sense of being able to do things in the future than children who were doing chores rarely or never. The chores we looked at were in kindergarten or first grade, and then we’re looking at third-grade outcomes that the children self-reported.

So by the time they were in third grade, they were like, “I’m a badass.”

Exactly. We were looking at prosocial behaviors. We were looking at peer relationships. We were looking at, “Do they feel they’re good at academics?” And you could make the case that children who are good at things are perhaps more likely to be given chores by their parents. However, we did look at this across time and hopefully that takes that into account as well.

Was it surprising that all these kids said, you know, that they were more confident?

These weren’t huge differences, but I think it was interesting that they were happier with their lives and that they felt they were better at academics, even a little bit. But it was also interesting to me that the concept of chores is not just the work you learn how to do but the contribution to the family and the household. It’s important in terms of thinking outside yourself or thinking of the ways you can make a difference in the lives of something else.

There’s also something to the technical aspect of yes, young children can learn to do dishes or help with laundry or sweep the floor and there’s the competence there, the fine motor skills that are developed, the gross motor skills, the language needed and the social negotiation needed, which is all useful for children and developing brains.

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Elon Musk’s attempt to unilaterally dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development likely violated the United States Constitution, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ordered Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to immediately give USAID employees access to their “email, payment, security notification, and all other electronic systems,” and ordered a pause on any efforts to shut down USAID.

Judge Chuang wrote that Musk’s takeover “usurped the authority of the public’s elected representatives in Congress to make decisions on whether, when, and how to eliminate a federal government agency, and of Officers of the United States duly appointed under the Constitution to exercise the authority entrusted to them.”

While Judge Chuang rebuked Musk’s role within the Trump administration, the exact implications of the decision on the operations of USAID are unclear.

DOGE and Musk were also ordered to submit a written agreement within two weeks that ensures USAID can reoccupy its former headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.

The foreign aid agency was among the first government agencies DOGE slashed in its effort to scale back or dismantle much of the federal government. The Trump administration has laid off thousands of employees, revoked funding for more than 80% of its programs, and shed its Washington, D.C. headquarters.

Critics of the Trump administration say its efforts to nullify the agency will cripple American influence overseas and carry devastating effects for some of the most vulnerable populations in the world, which relied on U.S. funding for health care, food, and other basic needs.

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Judge says dismantling of USAID was unconstitutional Judge ordered Elon Musk and DOGE to immediately give USAID employees access to their “email, payment, security notification, and all other electronic systems.”

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NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams are returning to Earth after spending an unplanned nine months in space.

The pair performed the first astronaut-crewed Boeing’s Starliner capsule flight to the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2024.

Wilmore and Williams were only supposed to spend about one week in space. However, issues with Starliner extended their mission by several months and delayed their return until early 2025.

Experts have said that spending a prolonged period in space — especially many months — can come with many changes to human physiology and psychology.

Changes due to microgravity

One of the biggest changes comes from spending time in microgravity, which allows astronauts to float inside a spacecraft or outside during spacewalks.

During this period, there is a decrease of muscle mass — due to decreased use and lack of stimulus through exercise equipment — and bone loss, according to NASA.

Without Earth’s gravity, bones that support the body’s weight can lose 1% to 1.5% of mineral density on average per month in space, the federal health agency says.

Additionally, without eating a proper diet and getting proper exercise, astronauts lose muscle mass faster in microgravity than they would on Earth.

NASA also says that in microgravity, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid often shift upward from the lower extremities to the head and eyes, which is believed to cause eye and brain structural changes.

Crews are at risk of developing kidney stones due to dehydration or excreting calcium from their bones without preventive or countermeasures.

Upon returning to Earth, astronauts are often examined by a medical team as they work to readapt to Earth’s gravity and rebalance their equilibriums for everyday tasks such as walking and standing upright.

“A mission of this length definitely poses a much greater risk of long-term muscle atrophy and strength loss, which are often impossible to fully reverse,” Dr. Shenhav Shemer, professor of Biology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, told ABC News. “The first priority upon Wilmore and Williams’ return will be getting their sense of proprioception – or how the body maintains its sense of position and balance – under control. Usually, this takes only a few days, but given the length of their mission it may take longer.”

Space radiation

Space radiation is different from radiation experienced on Earth. It’s made up of three kinds of radiation: particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, particles from solar flares and galactic cosmic rays NASA said.

Earth is surrounded by a system of magnetic fields, called the magnetosphere, that protects people from harmful space radiation. However, the higher a person is in altitude, the higher the dose of radiation they are exposed to.

Due to prolonged exposure, astronauts can be at significant risk for radiation sickness and have a higher lifetime risk of cancer, central nervous system effects, and degenerative diseases, according to NASA.

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For decades, Keith Krehbiel took high doses of medications with a debilitating side effect—severe nausea—following his diagnosis with early-onset Parkinson’s disease at age 42 in 1997. When each dose wore off, he experienced dyskinesia—involuntary, repetitive muscle movements. In his case, this consisted of head bobbing and weaving. Krehbiel is among one million Americans who live with this progressive neurological disorder, which causes slowed movements, tremors, and balance problems.

But soon after surgery to implant electrodes into specific areas of his brain in 2020, his life dramatically improved. “My tremor went away almost entirely,” says Krehbiel, now age 70 and a professor emeritus of political science at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, whose Parkinson’s symptoms began at age 40 and were initially misdiagnosed as repetitive stress injury from computer use. “I reduced my Parkinson’s meds by more than two thirds,” he adds. “And I no longer have a sensation of a foggy brain, nor nausea or dyskinesia.”

Krehbiel was the first participant to enroll in a clinical trial testing a new form of deep-brain stimulation (DBS), a technology that gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Parkinson’s tremor and essential tremor in 1997 (it was later approved for other symptoms and conditions). The new adaptive system adjusts stimulation levels automatically based on the person’s individual brain signals. In late February it received FDA approval for Parkinson’s disease ‘based on results of the international multicenter trial, which involved participants at 10 sites across a total of four countries—the U.S., the Netherlands, Canada, and France.

This technology is suitable for anyone with Parkinson’s, not just individuals in clinical trials, says Helen Bronte-Stewart, the recent trial’s global lead investigator and a neurologist specializing in movement disorders at Stanford Medicine. “Like a cardiac pacemaker that responds to the rhythms of the heart, adaptive deep-brain stimulation uses a person’s individual brain signals to control the electric pulses it delivers,” Bronte-Stewart says. “This makes it more personalized, precise, and efficient than older DBS methods.”

“Traditional DBS delivers constant stimulation, which doesn’t always match the fluctuating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,” adds neurologist Todd Herrington, another of the trial’s investigators and director of the deep-brain stimulation program at Massachusetts General Hospital. With adaptive DBS, “the goal is to adjust stimulation in real-time to provide more effective symptom control, fewer side effects and improved patient quality of life.”

Current FDA approval of this adaptive system is for the treatment of Parkinson’s only, not essential tremor, dystonia (a neurological disorder that causes excessive, repetitive, and involuntary muscle contractions) or epilepsy, which still rely on traditional, continuous DBS, Herrington says.

“Our personalized treatment can control debilitating tremors for a person living with Parkinson’s,” says Ashwini Sharan, chief medical officer of the neuromodulation operating unit at Medtronic, the Minneapolis-based medical device company that manufactures this technology. Placed under the skin of the chest, a DBS device transports electrical signals through very thin wires to an area in the brain that controls movement.

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CLIMATEWIRE | How can projects that scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere reduce their sky-high costs?

For a planned development in Texas, one answer is to draw power directly from a wind farm.

The innovative project, announced Monday by three European companies, could be the world’s first direct air capture development to rely primarily on so-called behind the meter electricity. That means the DAC facility would run mainly with low-cost clean power that’s generated on site, not metered out from the grid.

The facility is slated to come online in 2028 and is intended to eventually remove up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year — more than the average annual emissions of a natural gas plant, according to EPA data. The planned facility is larger than any other direct air capture plant currently in operation, although several DAC projects under development are similarly sized.

The new Texas project is being led by Return Carbon, a Dutch project development and investment company, and Skytree, a direct air capture technology firm also based in the Netherlands, with wind power from the North American renewables subsidiary of EDF, the state-owned French utility. Carbon dioxide the facility pulls from the sky would be stored permanently underground by the Texas firm Verified Carbon.

“It is a new framework, which we have agreed with EDF,” said Martijn Verwoerd, the co-founder and managing director of Return Carbon, said in an interview before publicly revealing the deal. “That’s why we’re announcing it.”

The novel agreement would ensure that Return Carbon, which plans to own and operate the direct air capture facility, has access to consistent supply of low-cost clean energy from Texas’s windy gulf coast. Verwoerd declined to say the price per kilowatt-hour Return Carbon has locked in and said the consortium would decide on a precise location later this year.

For EDF, the deal would reduce the likelihood that it has to sell its electricity at a loss or even pay to add it to the grid, Verwoerd explained. Utilities can suffer so called negative power prices when electricity production exceeds the demand for power.

The agreement also allows EDF to redirect its electricity from Return Carbon onto the grid when there is “peak pricing in the market,” he said. In that scenario, the direct air capture facility could operate using renewable energy from a separate agreement Return Carbon has struck with other power providers or go offline until electricity prices fall to an acceptable level.

It’s a “win-win for all parties,” Verwoerd said.

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, scientists say the world needs to immediately reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, the main source of which is the burning of oil, gas and coal. At the same time, countries and companies need to begin deploying carbon dioxide removal technologies such as direct air capture to reduce the amount of carbon that’s already been spewed into the atmosphere.

Neither are happening quickly enough, with President Donald Trump promising to double down on oil drilling while slashing federal support for climate-related initiatives.

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Sleepovers were mostly a nightmare for me as a child, and I mean that literally: I had nightmares every single time I slept over at a friend’s house. Too embarrassed to tote my babyish night-light from home, I’d lie awake roiled with terror. Come morning—my Rolodex of anxieties exhausted—I’d immediately begin lobbying my mother on the drive home for the exact same sleepover routine the next weekend. I loved sleepovers.

Sleepovers helped me escape my nerdy little comfort zone. They were an opportunity to be silly and a touch subversive, and to get a glimpse of how other families lived their lives. Old-school prank phone calls were usually on offer—an act of mild sociopathy I would have sooner died to avoid than try alone in my own home, or by daylight. I once got a concussion after an excitable girl hit me with a blunt object, and I had to be driven home in the middle of the night. Another time a friend and I got in trouble for deliberately pouring copious amounts of “blood” (red food coloring) on her sheets as a joke.

We occasionally snooped around family areas that were clearly off-limits, and I recall that some of the more louche parents had Playboy magazines in full view in their bathrooms. My own family home was particularly attractive as a sleepover venue because, apart from the distinction of having a “cool” mom who provided junk food, we also had access to my father’s medical journals, which featured black-and-white photos of naked adults with genital tumors and other afflictions.

My childhood spanned the era of what I’ll call, unscientifically, “Peak Sleepover,” a period from roughly the mid-1960s to the early ’80s that’s fondly remembered (by those of us with poor memories and limited insight) for its laissez-faire parenting norms. Today’s parents appear more skeptical of sleepovers. On TikTok, a father and psychiatrist got millions of views for a pair of videos in which he explains why he doesn’t let his children attend sleepovers. In 2023, The Washington Post published an article featuring parents worried about their kids being exposed to a range of concerns, including excess screen time and domestic violence.

I’m not unsympathetic to some of the no-sleepover arguments, but denying our children a chance to learn up close from other families shortchanges children’s autonomy. I think it’s fair to ask why adults can’t organize our lives better to give children reasonable and age-appropriate experiences that put them at non-zero but nonetheless, limited risk, and that benefit their maturation.

No one is suggesting—certainly I am not—that children should be entrusted to unsafe households for a night. I’m deeply aware of all that can go wrong when adults fail to protect a child. I’ve spent my professional life trying to persuade adults to take children’s needs seriously. But one badly neglected need is that of acquiring resilience and self-sufficiency.

Basic due diligence (asking about firearms in the home, or whether older siblings’ friends or a new boyfriend are visiting, for example) is essential for any interaction between kids and other families. But after the threshold for safety has been met, why does it matter if our kids eat junk food for a night, or hear unwelcome political views, or sit through the wrong kind of prayers (or no prayers) at dinnertime? Why would we want to deprive a child of the occasional strange or uncomfortable experience at another family’s house—even one that might directly conflict with our values or our preferred practices? Isn’t an understanding of human differences a bulwark against frailty and narcissism? We’re not talking about moving in with a new family, just spending the night!

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Forget the canary in a coal mine: today the danger zone is the entire U.S., and the sentinel species comprise a growing list that includes the Golden-cheeked Warbler, the Florida Scrub Jay and the Mottled Duck.

These are among 42 U.S. bird species that have been placed on “red alert” by the conservation initiative Road to Recovery—and included in State of the Birds 2025, a new report released by a separate group of governmental and nonprofit organizations called the North American Bird Conservation Initiative. The report analyzes population trends for more than 700 bird species across the U.S. and its key habitat types—and identifies a total of 229 species that experts deem to be of high or moderate conservation concern. “Bird populations are continuing to decline, and one third of species in the U.S. require urgent conservation attention,” says report co-author Amanda Rodewald, an ecologist at Cornell University.

This is bad news for humans, too, she emphasizes. The concerning declines in bird populations “indicate to us that environments are changing in ways that can have negative outcomes for people as well,” Rodewald says. “We live in the same habitats as birds, so if they’re not healthy for birds, they’re not healthy for us.” In addition, bird-related activities, such as purchasing bird seed for feeders or equipment for bird-watching and photography, contributed some $279 billion to the U.S. economy in 2022 alone.

Road to Recovery had looked at population trends for each species, identifying birds on the “tipping point” and grouping them into three color-coded categories based on total and recent trends. For example, the Greater Prairie Chicken, an eye-catching and iconic bird that has lost much of its habitat and splintered into small groups with little genetic diversity, is listed as a “red alert” tipping-point species. In contrast, a “yellow alert” tipping-point species called the Pinyon Jay has also lost its woodland habitat because of drought and insects, among other factors, but its populations are stabilizing.

The new report evaluates how birds that are reliant on particular ecosystems are faring. Those that are found only in grasslands or in arid landscapes, for example, are doing quite poorly, with populations decreasing by more than 40 percent since 1970. Among 31 species that rely on arid landscapes, none are showing population increases.

One new development raises particular concern: duck species overall have seen steep declines in the past few years, potentially because of drought, Rodewald says. “That is certainly sobering,” she says, noting that waterfowl and waterbirds overall had always been a “bright spot” in similar analyses.

Peter Marra, a conservation biologist at Georgetown University, who was not involved in the new report but conducted 2019 work showing that the U.S. had some three billion fewer birds than in 1970, says that the new findings offer a valuable look at which species need the most urgent response.

Both Rodewald and Marra highlight shorebirds as a group to be concerned about. Species in this group rely on the delicate regions where freshwater or saltwater meets land, Marra says. “We’re changing the natural landscape in multiple and complex ways, and to expect these species to persist is just crazy,” he says.

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