Not long ago, the New York Times published a story about a new and odd ritual that had emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic: Mothers screaming into the void. The women profiled in the story were from Boston and “exhausted” because “for nearly two years, they have been trapped” by the nation’s pandemic restrictions. Twenty of them decided to assemble on a high school football field to scream together. “Their voices, which carried years of pain and rage that they could finally release, merged into an anguished chorus,” the Times reported. The organizer of the event runs a “mom wellness” website and teaches yoga; she initiated each new round of mom-screaming “by raising two light-up unicorn wands.” Elite, left-of-center publications have devoted a great deal of attention to the difficulties of pandemic parenting during the past two years. The articles almost universally adopt an apocalyptic tone (“The parental burnout crisis has reached a tipping point,” Vox declared in 2020; “Covid parenting is reaching a breaking point,” the Atlantic concurred a year later). The New York Times itself published a series of articles called “primal scream” that examined such experiences, although the newspaper limited its focus to the lives of “working mothers,” since, at the Times, discussions of parenting challenges faced by stay-at-home mothers are verboten. (To say nothing of fathers, whom they also largely ignore.) Many of the pandemic-era stories about parents focused on women who...