Seeking advice for the overwhelm of family requirements

I feel so dumb even posting this and for being overwhelmed in the first place - I’ll preface by saying I traveled to 30+ countries in my 20s, backpacking, wwoofing, budget train trips, spontaneous international flights, eventually graduating to using Scott’s cheap flights and boutique hotels in your more mainstream destinations - I feel like I should be able to handle this! :lolsob:

So here is my issue - now I have 2 kids, and am bound by school breaks and flights at reasonable times of day and affording 4 plane tickets. And I can’t seem to figure it out. They’ve only been to the US and Mexico a few times so the list of places I’d like to take them is basically infinite. but every time I try to look for flights I feel like they are twice as expensive over breaks (winter break, Thanksgiving break, spring break, the month of July basically) in a way that feels predatory or something. We live in a large west coast city. I’m flexible to going basically anywhere in the world as long as it’s over a school break. But we can’t really swing more than $1k per ticket right now since there are four of us and we also need to pay for hotel, which didn’t used to feel so limiting but now I feel like I can basically only fly to the west coast for that!! What am I doing wrong.

How would you approach this? I’m also accepting ideas of destinations that don’t double in price over school break dates.