In a conference hall in Jakarta on a humid June weekend, parents sat in neat rows as psychologist Ajeng Raviando delivered a quiet but firm message: “Happy kids berawal dari happy parents.” The Konicare Happy Kids Academy had drawn families not for entertainment but for a kind of emotional recalibration. Raviando told them that bonding is not measured by the hours spent together but by the quality of interaction, a notion that landed softly in a culture where parental sacrifice is often worn as a badge of honour. Outside the hall, children moved through interactive stations designed to build confidence through play, their laughter a counterpoint to the earnest note-taking inside.

That same week, some 500 kilometres east in Yogyakarta, the Minister for Population and Family Development stood before a crowd at Benteng Vredeburg and issued a warning that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Indonesia, Wihaji said, risked becoming a “fatherless country” — not because men were absent, but because they were present in body yet absent psychologically. His speech, delivered during the 33rd National Family Day, framed the emotional engagement of fathers as a matter of national urgency, a foundation for the resilience needed to face an era of rapid change and uncertainty. The twin scenes — a parenting workshop and a ministerial address — captured a shift rippling far beyond the archipelago.

Viewed from Buenos Aires, the same preoccupation with limits and emotional sustainability takes a more clinical form. Mental health specialists there have released a guide of ten strategies for saying no without guilt, aimed at both middle managers and family members. The advice is strikingly practical: delay a response with a neutral phrase to avoid accepting commitments under pressure; prioritise one’s own agenda before examining others’ demands; in the home, state time constraints clearly and without excessive justification, because over-explaining weakens one’s position. The guide, reported in the Argentine press, frames the inability to refuse external demands as a direct contributor to chronic exhaustion diagnoses. In the corporate sphere, the same specialists suggest proposing viable alternatives rather than a flat refusal, a technique that signals commitment while safeguarding private hours. The underlying logic, shared across continents, is that self-preservation is not selfishness but a prerequisite for sustained contribution.

In the United States, psychiatrist Judith Joseph has observed a pattern among high-functioning patients who appear outwardly successful yet feel hollow. She describes chronic people-pleasing as a risk factor for what is informally called high-functioning depression, a state in which individuals continue to perform their roles while experiencing hopelessness and anhedonia. “They have developed this personality and this identity tied to doing for others,” Joseph told Business Insider, “and they kind of lose who they are.” Her patients, she notes, often end up in emergency rooms with neurological symptoms or physical exhaustion, their bodies breaking down while their minds keep coasting. The Australian workplace, too, echoes this tension: a quiet achiever wrote to an advice column lamenting that her leadership during organisational change went unrecognised, her results failing to speak for themselves. The columnist’s counsel — keep a running list of contributions, proactively discuss career aspirations with managers — reads like a secular version of the Argentine guide, a nudge toward self-advocacy without bravado.

In Bangladesh, the search for equilibrium draws on older resources. An Islamic teacher writing in Prothom Alo outlines six habits for a believer’s tranquillity: remembrance of God, regular prayer, honesty, patience, gratitude, and moderation in consumption. The text cites Quranic verses to argue that inner peace is not a product of material abundance but of spiritual and moral cultivation. It is a reminder that the impulse to set boundaries, to refuse the relentless demands of the external world, can be framed not as a modern psychological technique but as an ancient discipline of the soul. Back in Jakarta, as the academy wound down and children scattered from the play areas, the minister’s words from Yogyakarta still hung in the air: family resilience, he had said, is not an alternative but an absolute necessity. The parents who had listened to Raviando were not given a list of rules; they were handed a permission slip — to be present, to be limited, and to begin with themselves.