Today’s Parents: ‘Exhausted, Burned Out and Perpetually Behind’

In his recent advisory on parents’ mental health, the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek M. Murthy, said out loud what many parents might have only furtively admitted: Parenting today is too hard and stressful.

Of course, there have always been concerns about families’ well-being. And while some of today’s parents’ fears are newer — cellphones, school shootings, fentanyl — parents have always worried about their children.

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So why has parental stress risen to the level of a rare surgeon general’s warning about an urgent public health issue — putting it in the same category as cigarettes and AIDS?

It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy — that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.

This parenting style is known as intensive parenting, as sociologist Sharon Hays described it in the late 1990s. It involves “painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics and futures through everyday interactions and activities,” sociologists Melissa Milkie and Kei Nomaguchi have written.

But we may have reached a point, the surgeon general and other experts suggest, where intensive parenting has become too intense for parents.

Parents spend greater shares of their money on their children than parents did a generation ago, especially for extracurricular activities like sports or tutoring. They spend more time actively engaged with them, reading or on the floor playing.

Although rich parents are more able to make these investments, the pressure to parent like this reaches across class, research has shown.

Parents blame themselves when they fear they don’t measure up. A majority say they feel their children’s successes or failures reflect on them, and significant shares feel judged for their parenting, the Pew Research Center found. The surgeon general called out an intense culture of comparison, exacerbated by the internet.

“Chasing these unreasonable expectations has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind,” Murthy wrote in his advisory, issued in late August.

How Parenting Became So Intensive

Several factors led parents to feel this way. Scientists learned more about how early childhood experiences could affect children’s long-term outcomes, and some parents took it further, concluding that young children’s lives must be constantly optimized and stimulating.

Many parents, even of very young children, were driven by anxiety about college, as a degree became more essential to earning a middle-class wage, and admissions became more competitive.

In recent years, the pressure has grown worse, said Milkie and Nomaguchi, who wrote a review of scholarship on the intensity and stress of parenting since 2010. Parents feel they need to make up for what their children lost during the pandemic. Social media has made comparisons with other parents inescapable. Technological change has made it harder to prepare children for future work. Americans have less faith that the political system can address families’ problems.

Although mothers feel much of the pressure to parent intensively, fathers increasingly feel it too. Although they are spending more time with children than they used to, they’re also likelier to say it’s not enough.

Behind it all is the American belief that parenting is an individual task, not a societal one. While many Americans experience loneliness, parents are more likely than nonparents to say that they do and that no one understands the extent of their stress.

“In the U.S., it’s this sense of individualism: You chose to have kids, so go raise them,” said Milkie, who works at the University of Toronto. “Parents need the village, but people are not as available as they were.”

Unlike other rich countries, the United States has few universal federal family policies, like paid leave or child care subsidies. During the women’s movement of the 1970s, the country considered the idea that government and employer policies could help parents work and care for their families, as Kirsten Swinth, a history professor at Fordham, has written. But the Reagan era ushered in a different idea — that the government should not interfere in family life.

“This was very compelling — ‘I want control over how I raise my kids,’” said Swinth, who studies women’s and economic history. “But practically, it meant that the systems that would aid parents, especially as women went into the workplace, like after-school and summer care, didn’t get funded.”

Conservatives still generally prefer that instead of taxpayer-funded government programs, people in families’ communities — relatives, neighbors, church members — mostly fill the gaps.

But there has been a decline in the informal community networks helping to raise children.

Attendance at community meeting places like churches has decreased. Mothers are likely to work for pay, rather than be home keeping an eye on children — their own and their neighbors’. Parents with higher education are more likely to move far from grandparents to pursue careers.

Reenvisioning How We Parent

Much of the parenting conversation in recent years has been about whether intensive parenting hurts or helps children. There are fears that it can go too far, depriving children of chances to develop independence and resilience, though child development experts say that children generally benefit from more parental involvement.

But the surgeon general’s alert shifts the focus to parents’ well-being — which it said in turn affects children’s mental health. The increased demands of raising children, combined with responsibilities like paid work and elder care, have come at the expense of mental health, leisure time, sleep and time alone or with a spouse.

“We’re crushing parents under an enormous burden, for the benefit of society, and we’re sort of free-riding” on them, Swinth said.

The advisory called on policymakers, employers and health care providers to better support parents, including through family policies like paid leave and child tax credits. These are ideas that have historically been supported by Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, though certain Republicans have backed some of them. Donald Trump has said that as president, he would expand the child tax credit.

But Murthy said that a pro-family America would also require a cultural change — one that envisioned parenting as a societal good, and therefore the responsibility of the whole society, as important as paid jobs. He described parenting as “sacred work.”

That could mean parenting a little less intensively, he suggested. Friends, relatives and after-school programs could help care for children. Parents should make time for themselves, he said, to do activities that bring them joy or improve their health, without feeling guilt that they’re spending time away from their children.

And, he said, talking more openly about the demands of parenting could eventually change cultural expectations about whether all this time and money is needed for children to succeed.

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