Is Parenting Really the Latest Public Health Crisis?

A Personal Perspective: When normal life challenges are labeled dangerous.

Reviewed by Lybi Ma

The US Surgeon General, Vivek H. Murthy, recently issued an Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-being of Parents. A Surgeon General’s advisory is intended for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action. While I do not doubt that parents are under tremendous strain at this time, labeling parenting as a public health crisis turns what is, I believe, a normative aspect of life into a pathological experience. Let’s be clear, parenting has never been easy, but is it appreciably more stressful than during many other periods in recent history (during times of war, COVID, the economic crisis of the early 1980s, or other periods)?

The advisory suggests that the rates of parents who report coping well with stress have been steadily decreasing over the past decade and that this is the reason we must look closely at the way parenting is affecting our children’s caregivers. While factually true, we cannot overlook the way cultural shifts in perceptions of stress and a willingness to name toxic stress in our lives are likely helping to inflate numbers. Objectively, are parents more stressed than a generation ago? Or is this an artifact of a cultural shift in our perception of stress, and the fact that someone is asking parents the question?

The real story here is that parenting has always been incredibly stressful but that more recently the support necessary to weather this stress has been in decline as families have become more lonely, distrustful, and disconnected from the social fabric of their communities. While all of this is unfortunate, it seems excessive to label what remains a normative part of family life as a public health crisis when there are many parts of the world where parenting stress is far, far greater because of incredible poverty, social exclusion, war, famine, and political unrest. The Surgeon General’s report highlights communities most at risk for parenting stress, but the tone is still one of a general crisis affecting most families, something that reads as excessive.

As a resilience scholar, I have seen too often the danger of defining our everyday lived experience as full of danger and risk. Just think about how every experience of discomfort is routinely described as anxiety by overprotective parents, and one begins to see the problem with throwing around psychological labels when all we are experiencing are routine parts of human development and the life cycle. Psychological hyperbole by those responsible for public health only undermines the next call to action when a real crisis occurs. If we turn parenting into the next public health crisis, then how do we distinguish this normative stress that is part of life from the far more serious public health crises looming on the horizon, like the challenges facing unvaccinated children who are risking death from preventable diseases like measles and polio?

Do we dilute our collective goodwill to take action on problems like community-level gun violence when we call the stress of parenting a risk to mental health? There is nothing inherently wrong, of course, with the critique provided by the Surgeon General, but the messaging may have an unintended and negative consequence if it turns everyday challenges into wickedly complex problems.

A better solution, and one in keeping with how to promote societal resilience, would be to acknowledge that parents need support and that perhaps we are at a moment in history when we have a better, more scientifically sound understanding of the many interventions that we can make to improve parental well-being and the cascade of positive effects this will have on child wellbeing. There is a need for support based on recent scientific advances, but the strain on parents has always been there.

The recommendations in the advisory are good ones, implicating workplaces, governments, and communities in changing policies and practices to help families. This is the golden thread in the report. We should have done more sooner. I suspect, though, that most of the recommendations related to better mental health care for parents and more financial support for young families will go largely unheeded. Regardless, people act when they perceive a genuine crisis or threat. The report is an insightful summary of parental strain today, but it is too diffuse, with too much of the everyday to create the kind of panic we need for national action.