I heard my husband remind our daughter at least twice that evening to make the school lunches for the next day. Each time, we heard the same “okaaaay” from behind a closed bedroom door.

If you have raised or are currently living with teenagers, perhaps you’re not terribly surprised to learn that the lunches never got made. We discovered that in the morning, at breakfast, and were offered a timeless explanation: “I forgot.”

It was the second day in a row this task had been forgotten, despite the reminders. We were frustrated and informed our daughter that she would not be allowed to drive to school for the remainder of the week in an attempt to impress upon her memory this simple chore.

Guess who gets stuck driving busy teenagers everywhere when you take away their car? It feels like you’re really just punishing yourself, but maybe it’s also a way to teach accountability and consequences.

I was still stewing over that morning’s exchange when I was seated next to a former school counselor at an event that evening. She had worked in a suburban high school for more than a decade, and now serves as director of student services in another district. Her own son had recently graduated. I expected a sympathetic ear and perhaps some useful advice when I asked her how to get two high-schoolers to remember to do daily chores without having to hassle them. I’m not talking heavy lifting here -- just helping put away the dishes, keeping up with the laundry, taking out the trash, walking the dog, making lunches, picking up after themselves -- basic life functions.

Her response surprised me more than the unmade lunches had.

Forget it, she said. Let it go during the week.

High-schoolers are more overworked, stressed, sleep-deprived and overscheduled than we were growing up. They are taking more Advanced Placement classes and spending more hours in extracurricular activities, while entrenched in social media to stay connected to their friends. During her son’s high-school years, she explained, she stopped expecting much in the way of chores during the week, though he would help out on weekends.

She advised me to take a similar approach.

For those of us who grew up with tons of responsibility and far greater expectations of household contributions, this can be a difficult idea to embrace. It seemed radical to me, and I worried I might be doing them a disservice by lowering my expectations. “How will they learn responsibility?” I asked. How will they learn to manage time, how to function in the real world?

She suggested I take a hard look at their schedules. Both of them stay after school every day for at least a couple of hours for their activities, then they have several hours of homework each night. This is high-school life now, she said. When do they get downtime? Why add to all the stress? After all, adults who find themselves working similarly long hours often try to outsource as many chores as possible.

I started asking other parents of high-schoolers, and I heard similar remarks: When do they have time during the week to do chores?

The sad truth is that many teens are coming of age in a broken, time-starved system. Adolescent depression, mental distress and anxiety are increasing at alarming rates.

That night, I mentioned the counselor’s comments to my husband. He agreed that our no-car punishment was a little harsh. Then I talked to our daughter, who is in her challenging junior year of high school. I asked if she wanted me to take over making the sandwiches at night. She responded “no,” saying that it only takes a few minutes and that she would try harder to remember. But she seemed to appreciate the acknowledgment that she’s juggling a lot.

We still ask our kids to help out in the small ways family members should to keep a household running. But when they forget or fall asleep right after getting home, or the laundry piles up in their rooms, we’ve backed off the nagging and punitive responses. We’ve shifted some responsibilities to the weekend, when they are motivated to get tasks done before they are allowed to go out and socialize.

The next day, I made their lunches, and she drove to school.

After six years of researching how the higher education system works, Paul Tough has written a juicy, often-shocking book that calls out the College Board, the top universities in the country and politicians who have pushed access further out of reach from those who need it the most.

Tough, as they say, spills the tea on the whole system.

In “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us,” we meet people like Ned Johnson, president and “tutor-geek” at PrepMatters, the largest test-prep company in the D.C. area. Johnson charges $400 an hour to deliver results like what he did for Ariel, a young woman who had topped out with a score of 26 (out of 36) on the ACT after working with two other tutors.

Ariel’s parents poured money into sessions with Ned, who helped raise her score to a top-tier 32, which helped her get admission to her dream school -- Washington University in St. Louis. Wealthy families spending thousands on test prep is nothing new. The surprising revelation was the descriptions of the lengths this tutor went to to help his stressed-out clientele. In Ariel’s case, she was convinced that she needed to take a SoulCycle exercise class right before taking the test. Ned checked all over the metro area trying to find a class early enough, but failing to find one, he set up and replicated a SoulCycle class in her home.

That may seem bizarre, but Tough argues that parents and students set their sights on highly selective colleges because they know there’s a long-term payoff -- a belief, he argues, that is supported by long-term earnings data.

There are other behind-the-scenes moments that reveal how much money matters in this process.

“The easiest category of students for most enrollment managers to admit ... are below-average students from high-income families,” an admissions director tells Tough. He calls them CFO Specials, because they appeal to the college’s chief financial officer. Readers can see how this wrangling between admitting high-achieving students from poor families and lower-achieving students from rich families plays out in the admissions process.

It ain’t pretty.

So, where’s this meritocracy that Americans hold so near and dear?

The current system of highly selective colleges, aided by the College Board and its gate-keeping tests, works to protect its own interest and replicate privilege, Tough argues. He describes how the College Board, which administers tests like the SAT, distorted and delayed releasing its own data in public relations attempts to stay relevant and manage its own reputation. The College Board denies that they intended to mislead the public and posted a response to Tough’s reporting.

He wishes colleges would de-emphasize test scores in the admissions process, but he’s really advocating for much bigger reforms that would open the doors of opportunity for a larger number of students, like the GI Bill did for previous generations.

Some of the more disturbing details in his book further unmask the myth of meritocracy in a rigged system. Consider that American colleges collectively now give more institutional aid to each student with a family income over $100,000, on average, than they do to each student with a family income under $20,000. The colleges with the largest endowments that could actually afford to admit more low-income students, in fact, admit the fewest.

Tough also reports that the total black population at elite colleges has remained the same for decades -- 8 percent. About 15 percent of American high school graduates are black, but the percentage of black students at Princeton, Cornell, Brown, Yale and Harvard has never budged past 8 percent.

So, are these the years that matter the most when it comes to future success?

Tough makes a convincing argument that they are. He also shows us an uncomfortable picture of a system that is badly broken.

But most importantly and hopefully, he reminds us that it can be fixed.

Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg has triggered conservatives to the point where they have called her “mentally ill” on national television, and compared her to “Children of the Corn” and Nazi propaganda. Even the president of the United States resorted to mocking her on Twitter after she spoke to world leaders at the United Nations session on climate change.

That’s quite a reaction to a teenage activist trying to save the environment from catastrophic harm.

Perhaps they don’t realize that their attacks only make her message more powerful with the young people she’s inspiring.

Milo Marsten, an 11-year-old in St. Louis, missed school to attend a climate strike protest last week.

“I think she’s amazing,” he said. “She’s speaking the truth. She’s convincing people to do things. She organized an absolutely massive climate strike around the world.”

Milo became interested in environmental science when he was 7 or 8. Over the years, he’s prompted his parents to become more engaged with these issues and re-evaluate their choices. His advocacy at home has prompted discussions about reducing their household waste, evaluating whether new purchases are truly necessary, and even opting to buy a hybrid when they needed a new car. He takes note of the environmental practices of the companies they buy from, said his mother, Amanda Doyle.

“He does make me think more about that stuff instead of being so resigned to it,” Doyle said.

Milo believes in the power of individuals to help bring about change. “Certainly it has a lot to do with the people in power’s decisions,” he said. But, “we need a lot of people to make the small decisions. We can slowly change how we act and how producers of goods act.”

That’s an 11-year-old, remember.

Still, he also believes individual actions will not be enough to stem the impending climate crisis.

“I think it will take a lot of direct structural change, like the Green New Deal,” he said.

Greta spoke to these same concerns when she implored world leaders to take action.

“People are suffering. People are dying,” she said at the U.N.’s Climate Summit. “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” she said, fighting back tears. “How dare you! For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.”

It’s jarring -- but also hopeful -- to see young people speak more passionately and intelligently about climate science and policy implications than some of the adults in charge of making these decisions.

Milo brought up the president’s past tweets about freezing cold winters in an attempt to discredit the fact that the Earth is warming. He took a deep sigh and spelled it out like you might for a 5-year-old.

“Weather,” Milo said. “That’s weather.”

It’s not the same thing as climate change, on which scientists have near universal agreement.

I asked him if this is the biggest issue facing his generation, and he paused a moment before answering.

“There are a lot of issues -- like poverty, not everyone has access to things, and we are under kind of a corrupt government. But if we keep releasing this ever-increasing amount of carbon into the air, all that’s not going to matter,” he said.

It’s something that kids as young as elementary school have started to accept.

“In fact, I have never met a kid who does not believe this is an issue,” Milo said.

The adults attacking Greta might naively believe they can scare her -- or other children -- into silence.

They might want to take note of her response. She took the president’s mocking description of her and made it into her Twitter bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

These kids aren’t afraid.