Is Modern Parenting Uniquely Stressful?

Reflections on the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on parental mental health.

Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Key points

• The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory last summer on the mental health and well-being of parents.
• He warned about “unrealistic expectations” causing parents to feel “exhausted" and "perpetually behind.”
• I see stress rooted in a weakening of the emotional adhesive that makes parents and children feel connected.
• Parents, teachers and administrators need game-changing ways of “being in this together."

When the U.S. Surgeon General issued his advisory last summer on the mental health and well-being of parents, I was pleased to see a high-level administrator take the mental health of post-COVID parents seriously enough to issue a public health warning. In my work with families with young children, I see what Dr. Murthy sees: worry about the physical and emotional safety of their kids, uncertainty about how to effectively manage tech and social media, concern for their economic futures, challenges with friends and peer groups, questions about how to gauge and communicate how scary the world actually is, etc. The list goes on and on.

But my college history major tugs at me whenever I hear officials position issues as new, worse, or unprecedented. When has parenthood not been stressful? Millennia of recorded history are full of distraught, confused, and lost mothers and fathers who have found the sacrifices and fears that mark parenthood to be overwhelming. Their children perished from starvation, plagues, and perpetual violence, threats which have diminished in some parts of the world. What did Dr. Murthy have to offer to parents in 2024?

He highlighted concern about the intensity of today’s parenting reaching unhealthy levels. He warned about “unrealistic expectations” in optimizing children’s talents, academic success, and economic futures, leaving parents “exhausted, burned out, and perpetually behind.” He suggested help in the form of:

• A cultural shift to envision parenting as a societal good for which the entire society is responsible; raising children is “sacred work.”
• Parents taking more time for themselves.
• Parents proactively seeking more help from their support system, or “village.”

Good and welcome thoughts—but what I see in my work with families leads me to slightly different solutions.

I see parental stress rooted in a weakening of the emotional adhesive that makes parents and children feel authentically connected to one another. I see the intensity Dr. Murthy sees, but I also see infants and toddlers sitting in their car seats and highchairs more attentive to what’s happening on their screens than participating in the human interconnectivity so essential to the growth of the emotional wiring of their brains. The longer that activity, the more it erodes the child’s capacity to regulate his or her own emotional life, a skill that we cannot learn from screens, just human engagement. That certainly adds to parental stress. Solutions to screen management have been discussed in several of my previous articles, including this one from last year.

The parenting “village” is now a variably useful resource for many young families, given economic and extended family realities post-COVID. The Goddard School recently conducted a survey of 2,000 parents of children ages 0-6 that revealed profound change from the villages in which the parents were raised and the villages in which they are currently raising their children. Like most generations, they feel parenting is harder for them than for their parents.

A critical issue highlighted in the survey, however, was the reduction in the number of orbits available to parents in which to find support. Almost two-thirds wished their child’s school or childcare provider offered more opportunities to connect with other parents.

That means that parents, teachers, and administrators might need game-changing ways of “being in this together,” but this, unfortunately, is not the current trend. A recent study of teachers’ attitudes toward parents published in the journal Teachers and Teaching found the largest category of students’ parents were described by the teachers as “uninvolved.” Sounds like the 21st-century village needs an upgrade.