Family and kids are, by any measure, a huge time and energy sink. But that too is also important work that must be done, even if it has professional costs.

The guys writing these new things, more often than not, don't have a family and kids and do have all that extra time. If you have committed to a family and kids, then join a shop where family people work and be content to use yesterday's stuff to get work done, it will still work fine for the most part. You don't have to keep up with everything, perhaps just general trends. Just watch out for that gentle slide into irrelevancy. ;)

I would argue that wasting time learning the JS "framework of the day" is not the best approach to stay relevant. Learn the logic and math behind programming and you can watch the industry slowly catch up...

I was recently at a jobs fair and spoke to a lot of companies and everyone (apart from one) were saying they wanted developers who had the core fundamentals and could learn any framework or language (the latter obviously takes longer but not much longer). So they weren't putting an emphasis on having to know the latest frameworks even if they were using them, but instead looking for people with knowledge of core concepts.