It’s 5:46 p.m., and instead of preparing to eat dinner or unwinding from a full day of work, I’m at the kitchen table teaching myself to decompose numbers, then multiply and divide them using grids and boxes — a concept I don’t remember learning in school — so I can review the process with my kid, who’s got other assignments to complete, is tired from school and (always) hungry. Waiting in my inbox is a growing stack of messages from multiple teachers and an assistant principal, across two schools, all requesting some form of compliance. 

If chronic stress can shorten our lives, parenting through the final three months of the school year might actually kill me. 

“Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy,” as The Atlantic once put it. Research consistently shows that frequently switching between demanding tasks increases stress and makes it harder to focus. And yet most evenings in our house require exactly that: toggling between homework, inbox messages and expectations that don’t always line up.

Statistics Canada has found that over the last several years, a........

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